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remakethestars · 4 years ago

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Being Damian Wayne's Twin Sister Would Include:

Headcanons.

❝Exactly. I don't ask my dog to drive, and I don't ask the Justice League to solve my problems.❞

— Damian Wayne, Adventures of the Super Sons #9: Showdown on Hexworld

TRIGGER WARNING: Cursing, (Damian’s) death. Mentions of toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny, nightmares, blood, knives.

Headcanon masterlist.

When people ask you, “So, which one of you is the evil twin?” Damian always glowers, and you always motion to him.

You look disturbingly alike when only your eyes are showing; Damian’s got long lashes. Talia taught you a good tactic for tag-teaming in combat as kids was to pull up your hinged balaclavas and make the enemy think there was only one of you, that they’re seeing double.

Or for one of you to hang back while the other attacks as a distraction before the other knocks them out from behind.

Obviously, this won’t work when the two of you start filling out, but it works when you’re kids. It’s the reason why, even off the field, the two of you usually wear a matching outfits with hoods.

You utilize the same methods when she sends you to live with Bruce.

You don the Robin costume just like he does, much to the rest of the Batfam’s confusion (both because they weren’t expecting it and because they can’t tell you apart either), but sticking with the “red” theme, you go by Redstart.

There’s a rumor on the street that Robin V. is a meta that can teleport.

The two of you are freakishly good at mimicking the other’s voice and mannerisms, which makes it even harder for your family.

Jason tells you two about April Fools Day, and you make the most of it. Of course, Damian’s a pain in the a$$ and decides to go around pretending to be you and getting into trouble. You’re banned from the mall, and you still have no idea why.

The two of you can communicate with just an impassive expression (Dick says it looks like a prime example of twin telepathy to anyone else), but anyone close to you knows sh¡t’s about to hit the fan when the two of you look at each other and smirk.

If it’s something you can’t communicate nonverbally, you use your cryptophasia.

Cryptophasia is a language developed by twins when they’re learning to talk. Most of them grow out of it, you and Damian decided to keep developing it so it became more of a conlang. No one else has been taught to speak it, and they never will be. It’s for emergencies only.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was your Bible growing up, and the two of you call out verses when you fight together and need the other to understand a tactic (you both inherited Bruce’s eidetic memory, so you’ve got it memorized).

When you get too big to pull off the which-is-which game, you make your own costume and become the true Redstart.

It’s basically Damian’s Robin uniform (the Super Sons’s version is the only one I’ll accept), but the boots and gloves are black, the biceps have a white stripe, the lining of the cape is white (the lining of the hood is black), the gold accents become white, it has a zipper down the front instead of clasps, and the mask becomes black (including the eyes). The waterline of the eyes is white. Like a painted redstart.

If Damian’s into animals, you’re into plants. The two of you find common ground on the fact that pollution sucks, so when you walk Titus, you take a trash bag and gloves with you to pick up litter as you go.

You did not want to go to Jon’s school.

Not because you don’t like Jon (because you do), but because you know you could run intellectual circles around every one of those snot-nosed brats.

School is stupid. Especially because the American education system is subpar; everything about it is.

You hardly pay attention in class. You do all of the homework a week ahead of time incase something comes up. Usually you’re doing next week’s homework in class. You’ve written entire papers on your phone in Google Docs in the middle of class to be printed out later.

If you’ve already done everything, Damian’s usually drawing and you’re daydreaming or you’re working on a case on your phone.

The teachers are always trying to catch you not paying attention, but you little sh¡ts can always answer their questions.

Damian’s closest with Dick, but you’re closest with Tim. You admire his ability to plan ahead (see the entirety of the Red Robin comics), and you know that he’s better than both your father and your grandfather; you want to be as good as him when you grow up.

It takes a long time to wash the toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny our of your head, to learn that your grandfather’s ideas of “strength” were wrong, that it’s okay to lean on someone besides Damian, that you can be just as strong as your brother and still be feminine, that there are acceptable emotions besides anger.

Actually, your father teaches you that anger is more likely to get you killed. He won’t let you go into the field when he knows your angry.

It’s harder to drill out of you than your instinct to kill.

There’s a Lebanese restaurant called Tarbooshes (Teen Titans Special #1) the two of you go to when you’re feeling homesick. They make ox blood soup the same way your mother did, and it’s the only non-vegetarian thing Damian will eat for that very reason.

It’s nice to have a place to go where they know you by name and know what you want when you tell them “the usual.” It’s nice to have a place where you’re not a Wayne or an Al Ghul, where you’re just [Y/N] and Damian.

You disappear for an hour on your birthday to eat there. Bruce has asked you were you go, but you kept that between the two of you.

Speaking of birthdays, you’re eleven minutes older than him. He was six pounds and ten ounces (Batman & Robin #0?), and you were a solid seven.

After Damian died, you go to Tarbooshes to feel close to him.

You were doing all right with the no-killing thing until the night Damian died.

Heretic never stood a chance.

He looked so much like Damian it gave you nightmares, though. Nightmares where you killed your twin brother and woke up sobbing.

Damian didn’t give you a speech in his last moments. He just looked over at you and said in your cryptophasia, “I’m sorry.”

Not “I love you.” Not “Take care of them for me.” You knew that; you’d do that. He didn’t have to tell you, and he didn’t have to ask.

Just “I’m sorry.” Sorry that you were the one that was left behind.

It’s one thing to lose a family member, to lose a friend, or to lose a lover. It’s another to lose half of your soul.

The two of you had always feared you would die apart. It had always been a possibility; you weren’t stupid enough to think, “It’ll never happen to me.” Because it definitely could.

And it had.

You wanted to run away from everything. Even just for a while. Go to one of your safe houses in London or France or whatever and just — you didn’t know — stare at the wall until you felt better? But you’d made that unspoken promise to Damian — “I’ll take care of them for you; don’t worry.” — to take care of Titus and Catfred and Jerry and Batcow and Goliath, to take care of Alfred and Bruce and Dick and Jason and Cassandra and Tim, to take care of Jon and Colin and Maps.

You avoided the cave. And if you had to go down there for some reason, you refused to look at the Robin suits.

Dick noticed. He asked if you wanted them taken down, even just for a while. You gave him a look like he was nuts and said, “No.”

Jon was a mess. More of a mess than you were, somehow.

You’d shown up at the Kents’s. Jon was out doing Superboy things with Clark and Conner. Lois was the only one home.

You nearly scared her out of her skin when you materialized behind her and asked, “Is Jon home? It’s important.”

He had to know first. He deserved to.

For all he put up with from you two, he deserved to be the first to know when one of you was f*cking dead.

Lois, of course, bless her heart, had the mom instincts to know that you were in no way, shape, or form okay even when you were trying so hard to hold yourself together. She asked you what’s wrong, and it’s what made you break.

Your lip trembled. “He’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“Damian,” your voice broke. “He’s dead.”

Jon came home to find you in his living room in your Robin uniform, covered in Damian’s and Heretic’s blood, snot running down your lip, sobbing in his mothers arms and knew what happened without having to ask. He did anyway.

When you and Jon both finally passed out, your Uncle Clark flew you back to the Batcave. No one was in any condition — not even Alfred — so he carried you up to your room; took your boots, mask, cape, and gloves off; and tucked you in. Then he went to find Bruce because there was no doubt he was losing it too.

Bruce doesn’t tell you anything about trying to find a way to bring him back without the Lazarus pit because he doesn’t want to get your hopes up.

You walk into your room one day to find Damian sitting there reading the dissertation (the requirement was three pages, not 120, but your teacher would just have to deal with your coping mechanisms) you had been working on for your World History class and left up on your laptop while on patrol.

He said with the utmost indifference, “You’ve made some good points, Sister,” and, of course, you pulled out a knife and attacked him because this was — was — was some shapeshifting alien or hologram tech or a cruel joke — your twin was dead, this wasn’t funny, whoever did this was going to pay.

He met you blow-for-blow and flipped away from you before saying, “And here I was expecting a warm welcome,” in your cryptophasia.

“Brother?”

“Tt. Obviously.”

Yeah, a college level thesis. You’re smart. You inherited Bruce’s eidetic memory and were raised by assassins.

You learned seven languages and wrote five doctoral theses by the time your teeth came in, wrote your first letter to a newspaper editor when you were two, could’ve had a geology doctorate when you were seven (Super Sons #1), and it only took you a week to learn the language on Takron-Galtos. You’re smart.

You’re also incredibly skilled. You learned to drive when you were five (Super Sons #1), your mother trained you to go for weeks without eating (Adventures of the Super Sons #6), you can micro-sleep for days and converse with half your brain asleep, can use a muscular contraction to move your liver out of the way of a blade (Nightwing #20), and can place yourself in a deep trance to heal damages caused by a hematoma (also #20).

(My dumba$$ didn’t note what Super Sons/Adventure of the Super Sons comic I was reading when I took notes, so I don’t have all of them noted in the two above bullet points. But that’s where they’re from. If I end up rereading them, I’ll edit this and add the comic numbers.)

The first time on patrol you thought Bruce was gonna die, you called him Baba.

The next evening, when Dick came to visit the cave, he turned to you and Damian and asked, “So, which one of you called him Dad?”

“How’d you know?” you asked.

“He’s smiling the way he did the day I called him Tati.”

“He’s not smiling,” Damian pointed out.

“He is on the inside.”

Can we talk about how royally the Arkham Knights game screwed up Tim Drake? (Though, everything seems to screw up Tim one way or another, I guess.) Why does he look like a quidditch player in the gif above the cut?

Visit my headcanon masterlist.

DISCLAIMER ━━━ I’m a dumb white American, and I don’t know much about Arab or Romani culture other than what I’ve learned online. I hope I got it right?? If I didn’t, please drop a comment or P.M. me or something to let me know!

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hqatato · 4 years ago

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Rainy Day

You look out the window as the rain pours outside, the droplets racing down the glass.

"Seriously?" You say to yourself.

The day was already hard enough and it was about to get harder. And colder. And soakier.

"And for your homework, you are to read pages 112-120 and complete questions 1-10. That is all."

You finish up writing down the assignment in your notebook the teacher announced as the bell rings.

Closing your books, you place them in your bag and get up, exiting the class.

"Maybe I should ask someone to share?"

You shake your head and sigh.

"Nah. I'd probably be too much of a bother."

You walk outside and stand under the covering, watching as other students happily go ahead of you.

"I should wait here for a bit. The rain will clear up soon. I hope."

It was Friday. No one wants to stay after school on a Friday.

"Hello?"

You turn and look up to see a boy with (preferred color hair) and (preferred color eyes). He was rather, well, cute.

He smiled down at you, before holding part of the umbrella over your head.

"I'll walk you home if you'd like."

"Oh, um, thank you."

You felt bad for taking up the boy's time, but hey, it's Friday. Not to mention, he did ask first.

Making sure you stayed under the umbrella, the boy kept up with your pace, since his legs were a bit longer than yours.

You look around, the cars passing by splashing water on the sidewalk and little children jumping in the puddles.

All of a sudden, a streak of lightning hits the ground, the little kids running home for safety.

"How about we go inside too?" The boy asks. "I mean, if you really need to get home, we don't have to."

You shake your head.

"It's fine. It'll be safer inside, anyway."

He smiles and you follow him into a little bakery.

The two of you sit at a table and you look out the window.

"So what's your name?"

You turn back to the boy.

"I'm Y/N."

"My name's (preferred boy's name)." He replies. "It's nice to meet you, Y/N."

You smile and shake the boy's hand.

"It's nice to meet you too, B/N."

B/N gets up, and takes out his wallet.

"I'll be right back."

You watch as he orders a couple of pastries, before coming back with a box.

"I got us something to snack on while we wait for the lightning to stop."

He turns the box to you and opens it.

"You can choose anything you like."

"Thank you. That's very sweet of you, B/N."

You reach into the box and take out (your preferred dessert).

You take a bite and nod.

"It's really yummy. Maybe I should get some more."

"Here, I got it."

"Huh?"

Before you could get up, B/N walks back over to the counter and buys another pastry box which consisted of (your preferred dessert).

He walks back over to the table and gently places it in front of you.

"Thank you so much, B/N. But you didn't have to spend your money."

"Well, it's not everyday I get to spend money for a pretty girl."

He smiles and you look down at your hands and feet.

"Pretty? He called me pretty?"

"Uh, um, thank you again."

You couldn't even focus into B/N's eyes after his compliment to you.

He chuckles.

"I see you're rather on the shy side, are you not?"

"I believe I am." You reply.

B/N looks out the window and nods.

"The lightning has stopped. For now, at least. We better get going before it starts back up."

You get up and follow B/N out of the small bakery.

"Are you sure you don't want me to carry any of those boxes for you?"

"It's okay." He says with a smile

For the next couple of minutes, you both talked about your interests and hobbies.

Turns out you and B/N had more in common than you thought.

"We should hang out one day, just the two of us." B/N says, handing you your pastry box as you stood at your front door.

"I think that's a great idea. Just say when and most likely, I'll be available."

The boy tilts his head.

"You don't spend time with any other friends?"

You shake your head.

"The friends I do have always just spend time with others outside of school. So no."

You watch as B/N frowns.

"Don't they ever ask you if you'd want to hang out with them?"

You smile and shake your head.

"I guess they think I'd probably just be too much of a bother. It's okay though, I'm happy with time by myself."

You mentally sigh at that last sentence. Sometimes, it did eat away at you that your friends never asked you to hang out with them.

"Well then! How about tomorrow? We can go to the mall or amusement park or wherever you'd like to go."

You smile.

"How about the (preferred place)?"

B/N nods.

"Sounds good to me! I'll pick you up at around 1 tomorrow. Is that okay?"

You nod.

"That's perfect."

He smiles a toothy smile.

"I'll see you tomorrow at 1 then!"

"Okay. Please stay safe on the way home too!"

B/N turns around.

"I promise you, I'll be alright."

He waves and you wave back, before entering your house.

The boy watches as you walk inside before balling up his fist, an angry look now plastered across the male's face.

"Who the fuck is Y/N's friends?! Why does she even have friends?! It's not like they care for her that fucking much!"

The boy begins to chuckle a little before laughing loudly, others around him giving him a weird look.

B/N glares at them and they turn back to whatever they were doing.

"Well, in the end, it won't matter. They'll be dead. All of them."

#yandere #yandere boy #yandere x reader #x reader #yandere male #psycho #psycho x reader #psycho boy #psycho male #yandere fanfiction

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bardengarde · 5 years ago

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4, 5, and 7 for the historical figure asks!!!!!!!!

First of all, what is the name of your favorite historical figure?

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

4. In your eyes, what is their biggest strength?

The more I thought about answering this, the more difficult the question became! In the end, I think Chamberlain’s biggest strength was his character. In the letter he wrote to Maine’s Governor Israel Washburn, requesting a commission, he wrote “I have always been interested in military matters, and what I do not know in that line I know how to learn.” Source

Although that statement was only in reference to the military, obviously, I feel like it encapsulates a lot of his outlook on life. If there was something he did not know, he learned it; likewise if there was something he did not think he could do, he did it. “Do it; that’s how!” His father had once ordered Lawrence whenever he was unable to free a cart wheel that was caught between two stumps and asked how he should clear it. “Perhaps the underlying thought was to ‘haw the cattle to’, back out the wheel, and straddle the stump. But the terms and tone gave no instructions- only the order. The youth (which is Lawrence; he referred to himself only in third person in his Early Memoir) seized the hub, lifted the wheel clear of the stump, and threw it over with such force that the cart-tongue knocked against the nose of the ‘off-ox’ and the whole team was ‘off’ in a jiffy.” Blessed Boyhood!, Chamberlain. Pg. 42

Yeah, you read that right. Lawrence pulled a Valjean with a cart he claims had “only three or four hundred pounds of hay on”, and his father looked on him with a “moment’s pale astonishment, but not a word was said.” Blessed Boyhood!, Chamberlain. Pg. 42-43

And, as far as learning goes, he was fluent in like 11 different languages, could play the organ and bass violin, and overcame a speech impediment by figuring out how to phrase syllables that frustrated him in a sort of rhythm as if he were to sing them. Also remind me to tell you about the preparations he took in order to study to be accepted into Bowdoin College because that was also an insane feat.

Beyond that, Chamberlain was a reserved, quiet, and respectful man. From what I’ve read, he treated all he met with the same respect he believed that any man was due. Even as an officer, he still did not put himself too highly above other enlisted men. He was humble, and the men of the 20th Maine idolized him as one private remarked. “Lieutenant Colonel Chamberlain is idolized by the whole regiment. He makes a fine appearance, mounted on his rich present, at battalion drill, but he does not ride him in the presence of the enemy. ... Of course I do not have much to do with him, yet, if I wanted any favors, I should apply to him at once, knowing I should get them if it were in his power to confer them.” In The Hands of Providence, Trulock. Pg 77-78

I could go on- from being able to inspire all but six of the 120~ remaining members of the disbanded 2nd Maine to fight with the 20th, to commanding his men to salute the surrendering confederate soldiers as they surrendered their arms to his men at Appomattox Courthouse. I believe one of the biggest reasons he was so well liked and respected by his men and many others who knew him were because of those core values of his: learn what you don’t know, do what you think you can’t, and to treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect as they deserve.

5. What is the most ridiculous statement on them you've ever read?

He wore a beard for the first part of his adult life up until after he had gone to war, then a Mr. Brown trimmed it all off and left him with the mustache that we all know and love and he liked the look so much that he wore it for the rest of his life.

“Mr. [Adjut. John Marshall] Brown took the opportunity today of cutting my beard to suit his notion of my face. He has left me with a ferocious mustache and my bit of an imperial only. The ends of the mustache he has waxed and twisted and they reach positively the angle of my jaw... and would almost meet under my chin. Mr. B. thinks he has me now to suit him- especially for a profile.” Joshua L. Chamberlain- A Life In Letters, edited by Thomas Desjardin. Pg 174

Don’t ask me how, but it reminds me of this vine

7. Let us know three random facts about them!

oh lord where to begin-

- Gonna combine two facts into one in that he was, in fact, a Horse Girl and dedicated almost two pages of his Early Memoir to a story of how he tamed a mare at the tender age of thirteen and mentions her again and again and how well they understood each other. That being said, I feel like any time he mounts a horse it ends in a near death experience for him. That same mare once jumped fence where there was also a low hanging branch and while she made it over just fine, Lawrence had to jump off her and grabbed the branch where he was left hanging there, in his words, like Absalom. One time he was trying to plow a field with the same mare, but had trouble steering her and opted to hop on her back to see if that would make a difference. She got spooked somehow and took off in the direction of a fence, reared, and Lawrence very nearly missed falling on top of the plow. He also had six horses shot from under him while in the war. Six! I’d add excerpts and more sources here, but this post is already a mile long. If anyone needs the proof though, tell me and I’ll make a separate post. For now.... trust me. - He was friends with the Stowe’s, as in Calvin and Harriet Beecher. Calvin Stowe was the professor of natural and revealed religion at Bowdoin College and Lawrence studied Hebrew literature while taking his class. Lawrence was also invited to the Stowe’s house by Harriet on some Saturday evenings along with some other friends of the Stowe’s where she would read her newest chapters of her current work before she sent it to be published in the abolitionist paper The National Era, what would later become the book we all know as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the Hands of Providence, Trulock. Pg. 42

- While he was in college, there was this event called “Class-Tree day” where the custom of each class could go out, find a tree, and come back and plant it on campus. The game was to find a tree as far away from the school as possible, and Lawrence went out with a group of friends to find their own. His friends had brought some alcohol with them (which Lawrence did not drink; he did not drink at all while attending college) and they caused a scene in a town called Lisbon and the people there complained to the college about the students and Lawrence was brought forth to testify against them and point out who had brought along the refreshments. Except he didn’t; he made it clear he did not drink any alcohol but refused to testify against his friends because he did not want to break the trust he had with his friends and commit such a traitorous act. The president of the college threatened to expel him and Lawrence still did not relent, and said that if he was sent home for this then he knew his father would be proud of him. As he packed up his things, his friends heard about what happened and would not let such a fate befall him so they all marched to the Presidents office and fessed up. They all got basically a slap on the wrist and Lawrence wasn’t expelled! Blessed Boyhood!, Chamberlain. Pg. 55-57 Original post is here if you want to ask me more things!

#joshua lawrence chamberlain #Joshua Chamberlain #history #20th maine #american civil war #ask game #bard rambles #maine manz #holy shit this post was long #art i am so sorry

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haveamagicalday · 5 years ago

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My 2019 reads

My top ten reads can be found here

4 Stars

All the Bad Apples by Moria Fowley-Doyle

Deena’s family is cursed. Any “rotten apple” in the family is doomed for a a tragic end. When Deena’s sister Mandy goes in search of the cause of the curse, Deena and friends go after her. This book alternates with stories from the past and present dealing with strong feminist themes throughout.

House of Salt and Sorrow by Eria A. Craig

A darker more horror story retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses. Personally, I felt that connection to the original fairy tale was kinda weak and this could have been pitched as its own fairy tale. It was definitely creepy and kept you on your toes throughout.

Lock Every Door by Riley Sager

Riley Sager is becoming one of my favorite thriller authors but this one was probably my least favorite of his 3 books so far. Don’t get me wrong, it was still really good but while the twist was good, I figured it out fairly early on. I kept waiting for another twist that would blow me away but it never happened. Still, this was fun to read and I still stand by the 4 star rating.

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly

After Cinderella leaves with her prince, her stepsisters are left in shame. This story covers the stepsisters lives after happily ever after, and maybe they will get their happily ever after too. This book was sweet and creative. Isabelle, are evil stepsister, was a flawed character but still deeply likable. There was some magic and greek mythology woven in that really made this story stand out for me.

The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen

Sarah Dessen does it again in this heartfelt tale of a teenager trying to find her place in the world. Emma Saylor’s mother was an addict and now that she’s gone, Emma only has her stories to remember her by. So where does Emma’s life fit in to these stories and how does the story end?

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

A non witch detective is called in to a high school for the magically gifted to solve a gruesome murder. This was a fun and unique read. It plays out like a typical mystery but the added element of a modern day world with mages and a magic boarding school made it it's own thing. I would actually love to read a series in this world as it was well built and intriguing. A big strength of this novel was I actually was interested in the main character's storyline as I was with the mystery. Sometimes with mysteries, the main character is just there to solve the mystery and nothing more. This was not the case for this book.

The Window by Amelia Brunskill

Jess’s twin sister is dead. She fell out their window one tragic night. But what was Anna doing sneaking out of their window? In this thrilling and emotional book, Jess discovers some of her twin’s secrets and sets out to learn what really happened that fateful night.

The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm by Christopher Paolini

A fun short read that brought me back to my middle school years. Eragon holds a special place in my heart and this was a welcome return to the world. It hints at more in the future and I'm excited to see were this story will continue to go. I will admit though that I preferred the in between chapters with Eragon than the short stories themselves. The Urgal story was probably the best but it seems like Paolini is setting up for another full sized novel in the series and it really had nothing to do with the story at all. Still, it was enjoyable!

The Dark Days Deceit by Alison Goodman

A satisfying ending to the Lady Helen trilogy. There was a twist about the main villain that I honestly would have hated in any other book but it worked so well in this one. I’m going to miss this fun series.

3.5 Stars

Echo North by Joanna Ruth Meyer

Echo North is a retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. This one had its deviations but was more of straight retelling of the fairytale. There are two parts to this book. The first one is about 280 pages and the last part is the last 120 pages. I think I would have preferred if they were an equal length. The first part could have been shorter and the second part could have been longer. There was a lot of interesting content in the second part that I would have loved to explore more. Still, this was a lovely read and a good retelling of the popular fairytale

Here There Are Monsters by Amelinda Berube

Skye is our main character. A high school girl that moved to a new town and just wants to be normal, maybe even date her cute neighbor? What stands in her way is her 13 year old sister Dierdre. Deirdre is weird, she’s creepy and she refuses to grow up. And now she is missing. All in all, I thought this was a worthwhile and exciting read. While I was personally left a tad disappointed in the direction it took, I know there are a lot of others that will absolutely love it. And the strength of the first half and the themes it deals with, is enough for me to recommend it! Read my full review here.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Based on Russian mythology and lore. This is a perfect fairy tale to read on a cold winter night. The characters are well developed and the conflict is subtle. It's a slow build up but never felt boring at all.

Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book! It was quick paced and kept you guessing. However, while I didn't think the ending was predictable, I did think it was a bit cliched. I was surprised by the twist but but it still felt cheesy. The rest of the book was really solid though. There were plenty of red herrings that kept you guessing and it was an enjoyable read with good characters. I liked that this one only had two main characters as opposed to One of Us Is Lying had the four but if I had to pick one though I would say One of Us Is Lying is the stronger book.

3 Stars

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

A retelling of the fairytale of the same name. It was such a sweet story! I thought that Ani/Isi's transformation and growth throughout the story was very well done. The romance was put on the back burner but I didn't mind. It was cute but a little rushed too. It was also very obvious who Geric really was but I don't think it was suppose to be this amazing twist or anything so I didn't mind. I liked the added elements that Hale put into the fairytale. Ani's wind talking ability was a great addition whereas in the fairy tale, she just talks to the wind and it’s never explained why. It stuck to the fairy tale very closely and I really enjoyed reading it.

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

Chloe lives with her older sister Ruby, the girl everybody wants to be. But when a night of fun with Ruby goes wrong, Chloe is taken to live with her father, leaving Ruby behind. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back and make things right for her. This was a strange book. I read it quickly because I wanted to know what was going on but the ending just left me more confused. I don't understand what the point of any of this was? However, the writing was beautiful and I loved the creepy and hazy atmosphere.

Teeth in the Mist by Dawn Kurtagich

This was pitched as a Faust retelling but I found little connection between it? I loved the Dead House by Kurtagich but her next book was a disappointment for me. While this one was better, I was still left wanting more. It’s strange that the story in the past is the main one, whereas the one in the present is done through transcribed video recordings and journal entries. Honestly, she probably could have done away with the story set in the present. I think many would like this book but it just wasn’t for me.

Twice Dead by Caitlin Seal

Naya lives in a world where necromancy is common, but the wraiths they come back are treated as second class citizens. When a solo trading mission goes wrong, Naya awakens to find herself the very thing she always found disgust in. Wholly creative with lots of twists, this was a strong debut novel.

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

I read Bardugo’s series of short stories A Language of Thorns last year and absolutely loved it. I was...surprised this was written by the same person. It was a very basic YA novel with a love triangle and super special main character. I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more if I had read it as a younger teen.

Truly Devious/The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

I went into this book expecting a lot of murder and creepy riddles left behind. That's not exactly what I got though. This book was just a tad bit too slowly paced. The murder doesn't happen until a little after the half way mark so the first half of the book felt unnecessary. I feel like 100 pages or so could have been chopped. What I really liked was the mystery behind the school that happened in the 1930s. For me that was the strongest part and I'm more interested in that than the modern day mystery. Which was sort of solved by the end anyway? I think there's more to it but if not it's rather underwhelming. Overall though, I enjoyed the book and the sequel was enjoyable too. Oh, and I need to set the record straight, there's a line in the sequel where someone mentions that the country bear jamboree doesn't have a movie based on it... but it does!!!

Hidden Pieces by Paula Stokes

Embry is the town hero for saving a homeless guy from a fire at an abandoned hotel late one night. But what would the town think if they knew she was the one who started the fire in the first place? Now Embry is receiving notes from someone who knows what she did. Now she must choose between letting the truth get out or given in to her mysterious tormentor’s demands. Hidden Pieces was a fairly solid mystery but it bordered on unrealistic at most times. Still, it was definitely a page turner.

Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy

This is one of those rare cases where I found that the movie was better than the book. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a good book but the movie fine tuned it a lot. The book was surprisingly long and the movie cut out some unnecessary stuff. I was surprised that there was two love interests in the book and I honestly preferred the one that was cut from the film. He was a much better fit for Willowdean and Bo in the book was much more of a jerk who was initially put off by being seen with Willowdean. The fight that Willowdean and her best friend have was much bigger and more dramatic and Ellen was actually pretty nasty throughout it. The movie definitely fleshed out these characters in a much softer light. The relationship with her mother was also much sweeter in the movie than in the book. It felt kind of emotionless and less inspirational here.

Pretty Dead Girls by Monica Murphy

Popular girls are turning up dead and our main character, Penelope, fears she may be next. I went into this expecting more serious take on Scream Queens. I read this back in September and I honestly don’t remember much other than the characters barely reacted to their classmates/friends deaths and the murderer was impossible to guess and was utterly lame. If the killer has to explain their motives with brand new information that was not found anywhere else in the book, it’s not a good twist.

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

This had a lot of potential and I know a lot of people have loved it but it fell flat for me in some places. The book is based on and sort of a sequel to the short story The White People. You definitely need to have read the short story first or this will make zero sense to you. Our main character, Mouse, spends much of the first third of the book cleaning out a hoarder’s house. It gets very tedious but picks up pace when the Twisted Ones are introduced. There are some good moments of tension but Mouse tends to ruin these moments attempting to be funny (which she’s not). The White People works best as a type of horror that is never truly explained but this book does just that. It’s at this point that the book lost me again. I think it’s mostly a matter of taste but I just wasn’t in to it.

Five Dark Fates by Kendare Blake

I loved this series as a whole but I did not like the ending. Mostly because my least favorite characters ended up as the “winners”. That’s all I’ll say about that.

The Invited by Jennifer McMahon

Helen and Nate decide to leave their cozy life behind to build (literally build) their own little house in a small superstitious town. Problem is, the land they’ve bought is where Hattie Breckenridge a women accused and murdered for witchcraft, lived a hundred years ago. This reads more like a murder thriller that just happens to have ghosts in it than a true ghost story. There were some great twists but it was slow in some places. Like learning about all the ins and outs of what goes into constructing your own house from scratch. Helen and Nate also suffer some martial problems, brought on by the ghost, that just made me anxious and probably wasn’t necessary. I know it adds to the drama and suspense but ugh.

The Best Lies by Sarah Lyu

There’s a murder. There’s a mystery. But that’s not really what this book is about. Remy’s boyfriend is dead and her best friend Elise is the one who killed him. But it was self defense. Probably. The majority of the book takes place in flashbacks starting with Remy and Elise meeting and becoming friends. What starts as a normal friendship slowly turns into a toxic and emotionally abusive codependent relationship. Ultimately, that’s what the book is about. It’s honestly a fantastic portrayal. It’s toxic on both sides but you understand why they care about each other and stay friends. Not all toxic relationships end with a death though and perhaps this would have packed more of a punch had our main character came to some conclusions about her best friend in another way.

Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

Nora is a Walker and Walkers are witches. How do I know this? Because she mentions it every other page. For the most part this book was enjoyable but extremely predictable. I would still pick up the next book this author writes though.

2 Stars

The Dead Queens Club by Hannah Capin

A modern day retelling about Henry and his 6 wives but this time they are high schoolers. The story is narrated by Annie “Cleaves” Marek, Henry’s fourth wife girlfriend. I'm pretty much assuming everybody knows about Henry and his 6 wives at this point. So where the book really lost me was at the half way point where it turns into a murder mystery type book. If you know your history, you know who did the murder in this book. So the murder mystery angle doesn't work here, The characters don't know for sure, but we the readers do. It becomes somewhat tedious honestly. Our main character also sucked. Cleves was your typical quirky girl. She says witty things that really aren't witty. She claims to be a hardcore feminist but demonstrates this by kind scolding Henry when he says something sexist...and that's about it. This book was entertaining enough to keep me reading but I had my problems with it. Especially the second half. I think there are some people that will really like this spoofy tongue in check retelling but it just wasn't for me. You can read my full review here.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

Let me just start by saying that I don't get the hype for this book. It’s an interesting concept but this book just did not work for me. It's somehow not long enough but nothing really happens throughout. The girls were not very "wild" and I don't know what the point of any of this was. This book has been called "feminist horror" and I don't understand that at all. The tox didn't empower them in any way and there wasn't any feminist themes throughout. The gore/body horror was minimal and not very creepy or disgusting at all. Overall, this book was not for me.

The Missing Season by Gillian French

Our lead character moves to a small town where kids go missing every year. The adults find logical reasons for these disappearances but the children of the town believe it is a monster named The Mumbler taking them. Interesting concept that wasn't fully realized. Nothing happens in this book until the last 20 pages. there's no build up or clues that led up to the big twist in the end. When the climax finally happens, it's over within ten pages and then the book ends another ten pages later. Minor plot points lead to nothing and the mumbler was barely played up to make this book suspenseful.

The Babysitter’s Coven by Kate Williams

Adventures in babysitting meets Buffy. Sorta. I went into this super excited and was hoping for something akin to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I did not get that. This reads more like a middle school book and was overly cheesy. I think younger teens would enjoy but I wasn’t a fan.

How She Died, How I Lived by Mary Crockett

Kyle texted five girls one night. Only one responded and met up with him. He killed her that night. Our unnamed narrator was one of the girls who didn’t answer his text and now she’s dealing with the aftermath of knowing it could have been her. f this book had ended differently, I would have rated it higher. I had major issues with the romance. The narrator starts a relationship with the slain girl’s boyfriend and it was so insanely toxic though it was written to be romantic.

Rereads

Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen (5 stars)

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen (5 Stars)

Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray (5 Stars)

Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (5 Stars)

Heartless by Marissa Meyer (4 Stars)

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (5 Stars)

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente (5 Stars)

Short Stories

The White People by Arthur Machen (2 stars)

I like the story itself but the way it was written was horrendous and hard to follow. It was a huge rambling block of text.

Bridal Boot Camp by Meg Cabot (4 Stars)

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn (5 Stars)

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alien-at-the-dinner-table · 5 years ago

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Roll for Panic Attack

*Trigger warning: mentions of depression and suicidal thoughts*

I am afraid of a lot of things. Clowns. Death. Answering the door when i’m not expecting it. Sticking my foot out over the edge of the bed at night. You know, rational, normal stuff. But right now, I'm scared of something that feels like it shouldn’t be as scary as it feels. For the 2nd time in my (albeit young) life, am taking online classes at my local community college. My first time was 2 years ago, and it sent me reeling into a deep depression. As ridiculous as it sounds, I never want to get back to that place. Who would have thought, right??? But im getting ahead of myself, so let me explain the past so one can see where the issues in my grimy future lies.

Sophomore year of high school is where our intrepid young hero begins (read in the voice of Brennan Lee Mulligan: DM to the stars). As anyone in a fiery hellscape would do, I explored a program that gave me a glimpse of freedom: Running Start. In this wonderful program, high school students can attend college classes either online or in person, and not only earn college credit, but can be at the high school less. Great! At first, I thought it would be amazing! I love to learn, and I love not being at the highschool. Suffice it to say, I rolled really low on my perception. But my perception got steadily higher the farther I got in the process of applying. I felt like it might be too much. That I might not be able to handle this. But everyone in my life told me, “you’ll be fine! You’re a smart girl! And your so independent!” So I continued on… feeling like something was off.

Cut to a month before Junior year starts. I feel…. Nothing. I’m bored all the time, and nothing really makes me happy. I’m so scared im going to fail college and it hasnt even started yet… To my family, I am the same. After all, I am used to faking emotions thanks to all those years of thinking panic attacks were SUPER normal right! But I began to explore what was happening. Our hero rolls her dice: 18. I realized something that made me break down in tears of shame. I realized I didnt feel love for my family. I knew I loved them, but I didnt feel anything.What was wrong with me? I tried to imagine horrible fates befalling my family to see if I could muster up some feelings then. No dice. (get it? Dice? RPG’s? Shut up this is comedy GOLD) My sister found me sobbing in the garage. Grabbing my mother, they went to see what was wrong with me. I explained how I was feeling, and even voiced my fear of being depressed. My mom wrote it off as burnout. Which to be fair, I don't blame her for. I had been acting just as I always had.

Skip ahead some more. High school is in full swing, and my college classes begin. Things feel...okay. I was taking 2 classes: General Psychology, and Introduction to Art. Psych was tough, and its reading was intense. 1 page took about 10 minutes, so 6 pages: one hour. The professor thought that because we were online, we needed to make up for being lazy and not going to a classroom. We had around…. 120 pages on a good week. Wanna do the math there? Let me break it down for you: 10 pages=1 hour, 120 pages divided by 6= hours. About. Add to that the 5 hour assignments every week, 1 hour discussion forums, and hour long tests every week. Our total for this class hours per week: 27. Now, remember, I was also taking highschool classes too, and one other class. Also remember that I was 16. With an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. All it took was a month to break me, and send me hurtling towards depression with all the force and speed of a bowling ball dropped from the top of the Empire State building.

Thanks to my natural ability to repress my emotions and fears, my body decided to send a clear message that something was afoot! I began to get full body HIVES. We went to the doctor, and she basically went, “umm wow, that's definitely an immune system reaction…. But you aren't sick…. And you haven't been sick…. So I don't know why this is happening…” Always what you want to hear from a healthcare professional! So at this point you might ask: did any of this alert you to the fact something was off? No. At this point, I was in complete denial that anything was wrong. Surely getting up in the middle of the night to count pages and double, triple, quadruple check that I had planned every single second of my week was written on my planners pages. What did catch my attention, terrorizes me to this day.

I am religious, and I do my best to pray every night. During this delightful stage of my life, I began to ask God to let me die. I asked that when I went to bed, that I wouldnt wake up. That it would all just stop. That way, I wouldnt keep on down this path, suffering. I thought if I quit, everyone would be disappointed in me. What a waste. How pathetic, right? Of course, this was myself talking. But I wanted to die. I didnt even care if I went to heaven. I thought even if I ceased to exist, it would bring peace. Inkey, dark, peace filled sleep.

This is what scares me. Because I can never get to that place. I hated myself so much. But what was worse was how I felt about my family and friends. I began to resent them a bit. Just a little. How dare they love me! Why do they have to keep me here? I knew that if I died, it would destroy them. I had no illusions that those I loved would be better off without me. While I thought I would cause them shame and disappointment in life, I knew that in death I would kill them with me. And while I might not have felt love as I do now, I never wanted to cause them pain or suffering. Ever. So here I am now. Better, because I can tell you it can get better. Scratch that, it WILL get better.

And now to the present: a full circle of sorts. I am so scared that this course will be too much, that I wont be a college graduate. Please understand: I honestly thought for a long time that I wasn't going to go to college. Not because I couldnt. But because I didnt see the point, at least for the art fields. And honestly I still do. But I know that even with a stupid certificate that I probably could have taught myself all the same information for a 10th of the price, it will open doors for me. And to be perfectly frank, I want to make my family happy. I want them to be proud of who I am. I want to be proud of myself. To prove that no stupid mental illness will take this away from me. Not again. I know I can pass and even excel in a college environment. In fact, during my tenure at Running Start, I was invited to join the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society.But I want to be able to mentally handle this. I want to be strong enough for ME. I know that finishing this won't make me weak, or if it is too much that it means I am lesser than. But I'm going to try damnit! And if it is too much, then I will stop, or at least work with my therapist to see what would be best for me.

And so, our hero begins her journey. Roll for Initiative.

#mental health #college #rpg #brennan lee mulligan

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lingthusiasm · 6 years ago

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Transcript Episode 28: How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 28: How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 28 show notes page.

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne, and today I’m talking to Hannah Gibson about Swahili, Bantu languages, and nouns!

[Music]

Lauren: Hannah, welcome to Lingthusiasm! We’re very happy to have another fellow enthusiastic linguist on the show today. I was wondering if you could introduce yourself and what your current role is.

Hannah: Yeah, my name’s Hannah Gibson. And I’m currently a lecturer at the University of Essex in the UK.

Lauren: Excellent. How did you get into linguistics?

Hannah: Ah. Reluctantly, perhaps. I’ve always loved languages, loved learning languages. I had friends who spoke different languages at school, and I loved learning the odd word here or there, or phrases and things. At school I learned a bit of German and a bit of Spanish. Then I went to university. I went to SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, in London. I got there, and I was supposed to be studying law.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: I got there, and I found out that you could study – I think the list was, like, 43 different languages from around the world.

Lauren: Yeah.

Hannah: I was amazed. And I thought, “I can’t be here and not study one of these languages.” So I changed my studies a little bit to study Swahili and law. I had this list of languages and thought, “Oh, which language do I want to study?” And so I studied Swahili and law really thinking, “Oh, I’m interested in languages, learning languages, but I’m not interested in linguistics,” because I didn’t really know, perhaps, what linguistics was.

Lauren: It is one of the biggest problems that people don’t actually know what linguistics is.

Hannah: I thought, “Oh, I like learning languages and I like talking to people, but this linguistics thing, not so sure about that.” Anyway, the more I studied Swahili in that case and the more I learnt about languages, I did an Introduction to Linguistics course, and I thought, “Oh, okay, this is absolutely fantastic.” Then I moved to linguistics –

Lauren: Yay!

Hannah: – and I’ve never looked back.

Lauren: We’re very happy to have you. I’m not going to ask you any questions about law.

Hannah: Thank you.

Lauren: But for those who aren’t familiar with the Swahili language, can you tell us a bit about where it’s generally spoken and other fun Swahili facts?

Hannah: Oh, absolutely. Swahili is a language spoken across east Africa. The homeland or traditional area where Swahili was spoken was along the coast of present-day Tanzania and Kenya and also onto some of the islands. You might have heard of places like Zanzibar. That’s, again, off the Tanzanian coast. But Swahili is also now, and has been for a long time, used as a lingua franca throughout east Africa. You’ll find it spoken in, like, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, parts of northern Mozambique, and southern Somalia, Burundi. So it’s got a huge geographic coverage, but that east Africa area…

Lauren: Cool. We’ll make sure we link at least to the Wikipedia article and a good map.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Lauren: And the domain of it.

Hannah: And across the global diaspora as well. But that’s sort of its heart.

Lauren: So you studied that all the way through your undergraduate career?

Hannah: Yes, and I spent a year in east Africa studying at a university in Zanzibar, in that case, in Tanzania. So one semester in Kenya and one semester in Tanzania just focusing on Swahili. That was where I really – my eyes were opened to language and linguistics. And I just thought, “Yeah, I want to do this for as long as I possibly can.”

Lauren: Awesome.

Hannah: I just then took more and more linguistics classes after that.

Lauren: So you took more linguistics after that. And then you ended up going into a masters?

Hannah: A Masters in Linguistics at SOAS as well.

Lauren: Okay. And then a PhD?

Hannah: In linguistics. Also at SOAS.

Lauren: I mean, if you’re on to a good thing.

Hannah: Absolutely. I think for me I’m interested in languages from east Africa, African languages. SOAS was a great place to do that. Expertise was all around me. And I think, because I’d studied law as an undergraduate, it actually felt like quite a change because it was completely different teachers. It was a different department. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m still here.” By the time I got to a PhD, it was a little bit like that. But, yes, it was a great place to do that.

Lauren: I don’t think it’s as common in North America, but I did my undergrad and postgraduate studies at the same university.

Hannah: There you go. If you want to study Swahili and law, actually SOAS is the only place I know in the UK that you can do it. So beyond that.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s not a lot of places. So there’s obviously a bit of a transition there from learning about – I think you obviously got into linguistics because you were interested in Swahili. What was the difference between learning Swahili as a language learner and studying – like, is your work focused on Swahili, or do you look at other languages?

Hannah: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I suppose it was quite a transition. The last few years, most of my work – my PhD was on a different language, not on Swahili. It was on a language called Rangi, or Langi, spoken in Tanzania. We can talk more about that. But that was when I first sort of came with more of a linguistic approach because, rather than – although I did learn a bit of the language, I was thinking of it as a, “How do I learn about this, and do research, and things?” I think it’s about, perhaps, building short cuts. If you’re learning a language, you’re just thinking of it in isolation. What are these words and how do I make a sentence?

Lauren: Yeah.

Hannah: And then with linguistics you’re looking for short cuts and common patterns because you’re like, “Oh, well, I know what grammatical gender is.” Like, “Oh, I can now work that across whatever language you put in front of me.” It’s making those connections, some of which are language-specific. And that’s really interesting. But I’m also interested in then – obviously, as linguists we’re interested in what is common across languages. What you can do. What you can’t do. Maybe bigger questions.

Lauren: I always think of it as the difference between learning to play football and learning to be a good football coach. The difference between you being able to kick the ball really well – and, like, I’m a terrible sports player, so I feel like this analogy works for me because –

Hannah: You don’t know what it involves?

Lauren: It works as an analogy for me because I’m very unrealistic about it. You can invest a lot of effort in learning, yourself, how to play the game really well, but you can only ever really learn a couple of codes of football, right? But, if you learn how to read a group of people and how they move and what the rules are, there’s more chance that you could potentially become really observant about how rugby works. And, again, this is a terrible analogy because I’m not interested in rugby or football but…

Hannah: I feel like you’ve thought this analogy through.

Lauren: This is my go-to analogy. So, moving from being a player of Swahili to figuring out the rules of the Bantu language family, Swahili is part of the Bantu family?

Hannah: Yeah, exactly. The Bantu languages are a group of something like 350 to 600 languages, depending on how you define a language or where you draw a boundary.

Lauren: That’s a pretty good-sized family of languages. About the size of Indo-European, I guess, which is the family English is in. It’s about 400 or 500.

Hannah: There you go. It’s a massive language family. That group of languages are spoken – I generally just say in sub-Saharan Africa – but, basically, from Cameroon eastwards and southwards with pockets of other languages that aren’t Bantu languages in those regions as well. But in lots of sub-Saharan Africa you’ll find Bantu languages.

Lauren: Just to zoom out a little bit for people who aren’t familiar with the incredible linguistic diversity of Africa, because I think – you know, in Australia we have between 150 and 300 languages, depending on how you count. But they’re all either part of one big Pama-Nyungan family, or not. And so we don’t often – and, you know, all of Europe is pretty much Indo-European, except for a few languages. It’s hard to comprehend just how much diversity there is in the African continent.

Hannah: Absolutely. I think estimates put the number of languages in Africa somewhere around 2000.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: I don’t know what your numbers for the number of languages in the world are, but I think –

Lauren: What do you say?

Hannah: I’ve heard 7000.

Lauren: Yeah.

Hannah: So, if you take 2000 of those being in Africa, that’s a massive proportion. It’s not quite a quarter, but it’s a lot. Say you have something like 2000 or more languages in Africa. Those are then broken down into four language families, broadly. That’s been the tradition anyway. You have four language families. And then the Bantu languages are part of one of those families, the Niger-Congo group. But, even if you put the higher end of the numbers of Bantu languages at 600, as you can see, of those 2000, you’ve still got lots of other languages. So, yeah, really high levels of linguistic diversity. Quite high levels of bilingualism and multilingualism across the African continent as well. In Tanzania, where I do much of my research, that’s one country and it has 120 languages recognised, you know, identified languages. So, yeah, it’s, like, a lot of linguistic diversity.

Lauren: And Rangi is also part of the Bantu language family?

Hannah: Absolutely. Rangi is a Bantu language spoken in central Tanzania. I started working on Rangi because I’m interested in, amongst other things, language contact.

Lauren: Right.

Hannah: So Rangi is a Bantu language. It’s spoken in this area of central Tanzania, basically the bottom of the Rift Valley, if people have some kind of idea of the Rift Valley.

Lauren: That sounds very – what is the Rift Valley?

Hannah: Oh, gosh. It is a valley that goes from, I suppose, that part of Tanzania northwards. That’s how I think of it. It’s, like, physically a rift. I suppose to do with tectonic plates and things. But I’m definitely out of my depth if I’m talking about those kinds of things.

Lauren: We’re not a podcast that’s enthusiastic about geology. That’s fine.

Hannah: There you go. But Rangi’s interesting because – for lots of reasons – but it is completely surrounded by speakers of non-Bantu languages.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: I was interested in whether some of the grammar of Rangi, the features that you’d find in Rangi, would be the result of contact with non-Bantu languages.

Lauren: Right.

Hannah: We can talk more about that. But one of the things is whether languages that are similar to each other have different influences when they’re in contact than languages that are very different. In the case of Rangi, it’s like, I don’t know, Spanish being in contact with Japanese or something like that. It’s really unrelated, completely different language families in one geographic area. And what happens then?

Lauren: One thing I’m really interested in with language contact is sometimes it makes languages move more similar because they’re all hanging out as like, “Well, I do this in this language and it’s handy, so I’m going to do it in the other language too.” And then sometimes they pull apart because it’s like, “Well, I want to be different.”

Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, one of the nice things about working on – just to step back – the Bantu languages is that you have a large language family with some really quite big, broad similarities, typological similarities. There are common things in lots of them, but then really small microvariations. You could say, “Oh, well, this is the general word order, but look at this tiny change between the languages.”

Lauren: These guys over here have to be different.

Hannah: They do. They do it different. One of the things that’s interesting about the area of central Tanzania where I work is you have the four language families that I mentioned in the beginning that are found in Africa – Tanzania is the only place where you find all four. It’s almost like the meeting point of those really different languages.

Lauren: Yeah.

Hannah: The question there is, if you’re a Rangi speaker and you’re surrounded by different types of languages, whether the language has changed to reflect that. And then the sociolinguistic stuff. When you talk about the nature of the contact, there are families where the people speak different languages. Their parents speak two different languages. Their children perhaps speak one of them or two of them. There’s a long, sustained history of what we would call “language contact,” people moving around, trading with each other, living next door in the same village, or whatever. Quite often, there are slightly imbalanced power relations. They tend to learn one of the languages, but those people don’t also learn the other one. You have some people who speak several of those languages, but not – you know, if you speak the dominant language you don’t learn the other ones as well.

Lauren: I guess it’s worth stressing that the situation is incredibly interesting and there’s such diversity in Tanzania, but sustained contact between very diverse languages and long-term, small-community multilingualism is kind of – globally, we see it again and again, and it’s totally sustainable.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Lauren: I think sometimes, especially if you’re an English speaker who grew up in the UK or Australia, you’re so used to this stable monolingualism with a few people speaking their own languages at home. It’s really worth stressing that we’re the weird ones.

Hannah: Absolutely. And, you know, we’re talking about linguistic diversity of Africa but, I mean, around the world people speak different languages. They shift to other languages when they move, if they need work. There’s all sorts of, really, just practical considerations. You move to a new area, you need to talk to people, and feed yourself, and those kinds of things.

Lauren: Do you work across all the grammar, or are you interested in particular grammatical phenomena?

Hannah: Oh, that’s an excellent question. For the research that I did on Rangi for my PhD, there were a couple of descriptions before that other people had done. Well, one woman had done a PhD – two people had done PhDs before, but I essentially also did a description, which meant that I had to know a little bit about everything because I went in not knowing anything. But I was looking at a particular feature, which is what led me to think it had something to do with language contact, which is a particular word order which is unusual in Rangi. There is a construction in which you find the verb before the auxiliary.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: It is a language which has the same kind of word order as English: the subject, the verb, and the object. The Bantu languages in general, you would expect to say, you know, “I eat apples.”

Lauren: “Eat” is my go-to transitive verb.

Hannah: There you go. I prefer it to “hit,” which is the one that linguists tend to use.

Lauren: I think I’m just hungrier and less violent.

Hannah: There you go. Exactly. So, you know, “I eat apples,” or, for example, “I will eat apples.” And essentially, in Rangi, if you’re ever talking about things in the future, so the future tense, you say, “to eat, I will.” That is cross-linguistically very unusual because the prediction is that, if you have a language with subject-verb-object order, “I eat apples,” or, “I will eat apples,” or something like that, you would always expect that “will” to come before “eat.” In English, but also cross-linguistically, it’s a very strong generalisation based on a pattern based on the prediction that you will find that order. In Rangi, it’s the other way around, but only in the future tense.

Lauren: Right.

Hannah: So that was my starting point. And, because it was in contact with languages with different word orders, really different structures, I thought, “Oh, well, this is obviously something to do with language contact. How interesting!” I had to do lots of descriptive work and documentation work to start with, but that was what I started looking at. I think in the PhD I didn’t really end up talking about language contact because I really got very excited about this auxiliary verb order and the context in which you could have it and couldn’t have it.

Lauren: That shows that, once you eventually got to linguistics, you were definitely not reluctant anymore.

Hannah: No.

Lauren: When you say, “I spent four years getting really excited about auxiliary order,” that’s when you’re like –

Hannah: And several years later I’m still excited about auxiliaries, can’t you tell?

Lauren: Excellent.

Hannah: So that was my focus. And then, actually, I found – we thought Rangi was one of the very few Bantu languages that had this order, and then I found another language that’s spoken about 60 kilometres away – so to talk about high levels of linguistic diversity in a small area – that also has that order. I’ve since found four languages, which are spoken up near Lake Victoria. That’s now much, much further away. But, if you say there are – even if you put the estimate at the low end, say 350 Bantu languages, there seem to be six that allow verb-auxiliary order.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: I’m still interested in why. Why those languages and what’s different about them? It still may be that this contact angle plays a role in that. If you speak two languages and they have different word orders, allow different word orders, then that doesn’t seem so strange to you to say, “to eat, I will,” right? Because perhaps your first language or the other languages you speak allow that, and then it becomes a natural part of the standard way of speaking.

Lauren: Nepali, which I use for day-to-day in Nepal, and the Tibetan languages that I work with, those languages have subject-object-verb, so, “I apples eat.” And now when I learn a new language, even if it’s subject-verb-object like English – and I know that’s weird, my brain is comfortable with a word order that I really struggled with to begin with.

Hannah: Verb-final is now your, you know…

Lauren: Verb-final is great. It’s the best.

Hannah: Absolutely. You know, imagine that over generations or your whole community also speaking Yolmo as well as English and any other languages you learned along the way.

Lauren: Yeah, awesome. Like, the only thing I know about Bantu languages, and it’s from the fact – so we worked at SOAS at the same time. That’s how we know each other. One thing that I know about Bantu languages is that they do cool stuff with nouns.

Hannah: Yes, they do.

Lauren: And I love nouns.

Hannah: Ah!

Lauren: So can we talk about nouns?

Hannah: Yes, please! They do lots of cool things with nouns. But the most striking thing, I suppose, and the thing that I always give as an example when people say, like, “Oh, what’s unusual” or “What’s the striking thing about the Bantu languages, about Swahili,” is that they have a system of what have traditionally, in linguistics, been called noun classes. They are like grammatical gender, if you’re familiar with French with masculine/feminine, or German masculine/feminine/neuter, you have two genders, three genders. Swahili, for example, has 16.

Lauren: Okay, that is – like, I’m not good at math – but slightly more than three.

Hannah: Yes, yeah. Actually, the gender system doesn’t make any sex-based distinctions. There’s no, you know, man and woman, or boy and girl, like, grammatically. The nouns are categorised in other ways.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: One of the really prominent features across the grammar of Bantu languages, actually, is the distinction between things that are alive and that are not alive, so animate and inanimate, or sometimes, more specifically, human and not human, let me just use the terminology, like noun classes. And then they tend to be numbered because you can’t get away with masculine/feminine once you get up to – and, in fact, Luganda, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda, has, I think, 21 noun classes. When you get up to that, you’re just like, “Well, let’s just number them because we can’t” – you know, masculine/feminine/neuter, you’ve sort of run out. You would find, for example, Class 1 would be humans, but singular.

Lauren: That’s a very humanist approach.

Hannah: Exactly. We think that the most important are, like, humans, or “person,” the word for person, the word “teacher,” the word for “child.” And then what’s conventionally numbered Class 2 is the plural of that.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: So “teacher” and then “teachers.” “Child – children.” “Farmer – farmers.” You can almost, to start with, think that, “Well, actually, I can cut those in half because most things in the lower numbers have singular and plural counterparts.” That’s probably true up until about class ten because after that you end up with things that don’t make a singular/plural distinction. But, to start with, for example, on the basis of Swahili, you have humans. Class 3 and 4 are things like, I don’t know, “mountain,” “river,” “moon,” maybe natural phenomena.

Lauren: Okay.

Hannah: “Tree,” “plant.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Hannah: Things like that. If you’re learning this language, these are the things you learn sort of like, “Oh, okay, well, those are broad categories.” And then, of course, you find something that doesn’t seem, to you at least, to make any sense to be in that category.

Lauren: But, I mean, people often talk about this with the French/German gender-based stuff. They’re like, “Well, why are these inanimate objects arbitrarily gendered? And why is” – like, the “uterus” is masculine in French.

Hannah: Oh, interesting.

Lauren: I don’t speak French.

Hannah: Yeah, me neither.

Lauren: It’s just my random fact.

Hannah: It’s a good go-to example.

Lauren: You know, these things are mostly semantically coherent, but actually language is a fun system and does all kinds of wacky hacks.

Hannah: Those are quite systematic, so you could think “Oh, a natural phenomenon” or whatever. And then the next ones are things that often go in pairs or part-whole relations like fruits, and trees, and things like that. But then you get to things that are, what we would say, “phonologically determined.” They have a particular sound. One class is things that begin with “ki-”, and then its plural is “vi-”.

Lauren: We’re really scrambling for sense here.

Hannah: It’s like, “Okay, so, ki-things and vi-things.” But, again, those things are most commonly inanimate because your human and animal things are going to be in a different class. Things that begin with “ki-” and “vi-”, nouns that begin with nasals, /n/, and /ɲ/, and /ŋ/ go in another class as well. And then you end up with a class which doesn’t have singular/plural distinction for abstract nouns, so, “happiness,” “love,” “freedom,” things like that.

And then another, I think, really nice feature of Bantu languages is that many of them have different noun classes for locations. You have a general location, often a specific location, and an internal location. Those are also different noun classes, like different grammatical genders if you want to look at it like that. That’s the nouns. But then, if you think about how a language works, that then spreads across everything. “My book,” you know, the word for “my” is going to be affected by which class “book” is in.

Lauren: Right.

Hannah: In this case, “book” is one of the “ki-” examples.

Lauren: Excellent. My favourite category.

Hannah: It’s “kitabu.” And then you say “changu,” so, “kitabu changu,” “book my” literally, “my book.” Whereas, if you’re talking about your teacher, “teacher” is human/animate so it’s “mwalimu,” and then it’s “mwangu,” not just the noun changes, has a different prefix, but then the thing that agrees, the possessive, the “my,” also changes. It would be the same for numbers, so for counting, any adjectives “big/small,” possession, “of,” and on verbs too.

Lauren: A lot for a new learner to get their head around.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Lauren: But the kids do it completely fine, I’m sure.

Hannah: Absolutely. You can also use it in fun and sort of – you know, there’s layers. You can put things in different noun classes for pejorative meanings, or to change meanings, and things. I think you’d like this example. The word for “bird” is “ndege.” If you think a bird is alive, you would make the appropriate agreement for Class 1, let’s say, because it’s something that’s alive. But an aeroplane is also the same word, “ndege,” but it’s not alive, right? So its agreement would be in Class 9 because it’s not alive. It’s the same word. You can sort of move things around.

Lauren: And so I guess this is how you can create new words. Like, when aeroplanes were invented, instead of doing what we did and cobbling together some existing English and French and whatever, you can take an existing word and put it in another noun class?

Hannah: Absolutely. You can shift things into different classes. They can then mean different things or have subtle different social meanings. You can cobble together two words and make a new word for something, like “telescope” or something because it’s something that “sees far away,” or things like “telescope.” But, yeah, absolutely. You have a different set of things at your disposal.

Lauren: Fabulous. You were talking about the noun classes for Swahili?

Hannah: Yes.

Lauren: Are they similar across all the languages? “All the languages.” You’ve looked at all 600. Right. Yeah. Obviously.

Hannah: That’s a really interesting question. People have made a distinction between Bantu languages which have what would be described as a “canonical” noun class system, which means that they usually have six noun classes or upwards. Swahili, let’s say, has 16 and Luganda, at the higher level, has 21. You tend to find similar patterns, animate things, sometimes a specific class for humans, tools, objects, long things, you know, trees, things that are not human but are natural phenomena, or alive, or whatever.

But then at the other end of spectrum, you end up with languages, often in the northwest of the Bantu area, sort of around Cameroon, Gabon, with a really, what we would think of as a “reduced” system of noun classes, many less than six, maybe, you know, a handful. The reason that people would describe those as “reduced” is that the idea that, historically, the Bantu languages – like, the predecessor of Bantu languages or what they all came from – did have this high number of noun classes. That was one of the unifying features of the Bantu languages. The ones that are in Cameroon or that area, which is where the Bantu languages are supposed to have originated, then, those systems have sort of eroded over time and fallen away. We would describe that as a “reduced” system, not in any sense that it’s, you know…

Lauren: We’re not picking on those.

Hannah: Yeah, but that the suggestion is that at some point they had more, and they’ve lost them. You can see why you may lose them. But, interestingly, even languages that have lost them, that animate and inanimate distinction is often one of the ones that remains.

Lauren: Okay. It’s really strong.

Hannah: It’s really important whether something’s human or if it’s a chair.

Lauren: Languages do this with all kinds – we see this all the time with different parts of the grammar that languages will have something in this very elaborate system, and then it will fall away. Like, English used to have this gendered case marking the way that German does. And we don’t have it anymore because the language changed. We moved away from that. This cycle of things reducing, or growing, or whatever, is a completely normal part of language.

Hannah: Absolutely. Yeah.

Lauren: It makes it fun to see how languages change in different contexts.

Hannah: Yeah, one of the things that’s nice about working on the Bantu language family is that lots of – there are written descriptions of some of these languages from, I don’t know, over a hundred years ago or things, but there’s often not long written records. You don’t find examples of writing, with the exception, actually, of Swahili and then maybe Kikongo and a few other languages. But we can basically trace a lot of the history of movements of those people in these parts of Africa through looking at the languages. You can see what languages are similar in terms of similar vocabulary and words, and then reconstruct where these people may have moved from, and what time they moved, and things like that. Language really can help us piece together parts of history that we may otherwise – yeah, they can be a part of the story, basically.

Lauren: Yeah. So Rangi is a smaller language, but Swahili is one of the largest languages in Africa?

Hannah: Yeah, I think in terms of – people say it’s one of the most widely-spoken languages because of it having this massive geographic coverage across eastern Africa. I think speaker numbers, really, the estimates vary. I’ve heard up to 120 million, which sounds massive – 60 million.

Lauren: But is that in the way that I, like, speak, you know, I speak Italian in that I can navigate an Italian menu. Is that the kind of – because it’s a lingua franca, the quality, not to put a label on it, but the…

Hannah: I mean, I think probably – I don’t really know. But let’s say, like, 60 or 90 million or something. I think actually lots of those people are really very competent speakers who use it regularly for important purposes in their life. Tanzania, interestingly, was the only country in Africa that declared an African language its official language at independence, rather than a former colonial language. Tanzania’s primary education is in Swahili. Parliament speaks in Swahili. Radio stations speak in Swahili. But then, when you get to those other countries, the official status of Swahili perhaps would be slightly different or is different. But I think that there are languages across the African continent which have higher numbers of speakers because, for example, Nigeria, for example, is so popular, and those west African areas, so that you have higher numbers of speakers. People usually say that Swahili’s the most widespread, but you can have a widespread spoken language that’s the sort of – you know, because it’s lingua franca status.

Lauren: That’s their positive spin.

Hannah: Exactly. They want something.

Lauren: So there’re people being educated in Swahili and using it for business. Are there many Swahili-speaking linguists in Tanzania or other countries?

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a sort of, not a divide, but there are people studying Swahili as a subject, and linguists working on Swahili and other, let’s say, the main colleagues I have are in east Africa, so other east African languages. I’ve done lots of work with people at the University of Dar es Salaam. They have a department of linguistics, foreign languages and linguistics. And then also in Zanzibar, and also in Kenya. There are universities where people are doing research on Swahili, and there’s linguistic journals written in Swahili, published in Swahili. And then the other big cohort of people would be people in America or Europe who are learning Swahili. In America quite a lot of them are also of African origin. They’re from Africa and may have grown up speaking Swahili and then have gone to American universities to teach Swahili or do research and things like that.

But, as a whole, there is an ongoing range of challenges that people are facing. Lots of colleagues in African universities or east Africa have real shortages of funding, access to funding, for external conferences, to travel, to do research. There are really high numbers of students, so, you know, again, universities – which it’s great to see so many students interested in these topics and wanting to look at languages and stuff. But, obviously, you know, with limited resources.

And then the other thing you find is that in many cases people are, rather than studying Swahili, perhaps, or Bantu languages from a linguistic perspective, people are interested more in the practical applications. Like, if you’re in Tanzania, and there are 120 languages and, yes, primary education is in Swahili, most of those children, when they arrive at school, don’t speak Swahili. So what can we do about that? What are the practical implications of that? How can we make transitions more smooth? How can we ensure that people who have or have not been to school have access to services, and information, and things like that? More, perhaps, linguistics and language relating to education, relating to access to resources, and stuff like that.

Whereas, I think some of the more theoretical linguistics and looking at that for its own sake is – people are doing that as well, but there’s this constant tension between, “Well, you know, we also have these issues that are right in front of our face and the government wants us to solve them.” And they say, “Well, you’re a linguist at the University of Dar e Salaam. You can solve this or do this.” That’s something that you see quite a lot as well in departments that I know.

Lauren: Yeah, being super interested in noun classes is great, but it’s such a privilege. And, yeah, there’s much more pressing – I imagine people feel that there’s much more pressing things that need to be done.

Hannah: Absolutely. I suppose there are – it’s great. And there’s more and more students who are also thinking that, “Oh, well, I speak a language that is not written down, that there’s no descriptive grammar on, that no one’s written an article on. I can contribute to that.” So there are increasingly younger linguists coming through and doing that and seeing that that is really important as well. And that’s important for identity, and self-determination, and things like that. But, at the same time, yeah, as, actually, all of us deal with, you know, “Well, if you want to get a job, how are you going to navigate your interest in that into employment, or stability, or the kind of opportunities that face you?” I’ve been really lucky to be able to work with fantastic colleagues. Most of my research is in Tanzania so those are the ones I have the strongest links with, but going to conferences is always a great opportunity to meet with people from across the continent, or based at universities in other countries, and things like that.

Lauren: Awesome. If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be?

Hannah: It’s awesome. Don’t be like me and think that languages are the only thing that’s interesting. Also linguistics is interesting! That’s also something that you can study. Ah, yes, being monolingual is not the norm in the world.

Lauren: Right. It’s true.

Hannah: Yeah, yeah, I don’t know how much that’s about linguistics. But I think we can, as you were saying earlier on, think that it’s normal just to speak a language and actually, globally, it’s not.

Lauren: Yeah, and I think there are linguistics departments and there’s linguistics training that leaves you with that lesson a lot stronger than other departments.

Hannah: True.

Lauren: I feel privileged to have been at a university that made that very clear to me.

Hannah: Me too.

Lauren: It seems like we had the same experience at SOAS.

Hannah: Absolutely.

Lauren: Fabulous.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play Music, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr.

You can get your IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. And Gretchen can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and her blog is AllThingsLingusitic.com.

To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We also really appreciate it if you could rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A. E. Prevost, and our production assistants are Fabianne Anderberg and Celine Yoon, our music is by The Triangles. We’ll leave you with Hannah.

Hannah: Stay lingthusiastic!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #language #transcripts #episode 28 #interview #bantu #bantu languages #hannah gibson #interviews #swahili #kiswahili #rangi #nouns #words #word order #language change #language contact

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prorevenge · 7 years ago

Text

Screw with my grade? Have fun dealing with an investigation from the dean's office.

Buckle in, because this is a long read, but the end is worth it.

Last semester I took an online only ECON-101 class to fulfill one of the requirements of my associates degree. I chose economics because it sounded more interesting than the other options - big mistake. This teacher, let's call him Professor Y., does absolutely no teaching online, takes forever to answer questions, and doesn't really seem to care about actually helping us learn. There was a website, called MyEconLab, which is where homework, quizzes, and tests were taken. Other than that, there were also weekly discussion boards to engage with our peers.

Now I'm not going to lie, I didn't deserve an A for this class, or even a B. I missed some assignments and didn't do so well on others. However, I thought that I earned a C. I got sick in the middle of the semester and missed some assignments, which was totally my fault. I noticed that I was now in danger of getting a D for the class, which wouldn't be good at all. I looked at the syllabus, which was littered with typos and was generally very confusing. I found a passage that says that the final was worth 100 points, and at this point in the class we only had 255 total. It seemed to be worth a big chunk of points. There was also a term paper assigned, which was also worth 100 points.

I focused more on the final than I did the term paper, because I'm better at multiple choice than I am papers. I received an 83% on the final, and I was satisfied that I would scrape by with a C.

The class ended on December 15th, and the final was not added to my gradebook. I thought that it was a little weird, but I didn't think anything of it. The professor had been taking a long time all semester to grade assignments. I checked every couple of days to see what my final grade was, and on January 10th, I was assigned a D. I checked my gradebook and saw that I got a 67% on the term paper, which is around what I expected. However, my final was nowhere to be found. In addition, the only assignment that referenced the MyEconLab website had not been updated since November 6th. Remember, the class ended on December 15th, so there was almost a month of assignments that weren't counting towards my grade.

Thinking that there must be some mistake, I sent my professor an email.

Hello Professor,

I checked my grade on webadvisor and it says that I have a D. I logged into blackboard and it says I have a 67%, but that doesn't appear to be taking into account the grade I received for my final exam, as well as some of the other MyEconLab assignments.

In addition, I'm having a hard time understanding your grading rubric, so any clarifications you can offer there would be most appreciated.

Thank you,

Ceryliae

I did not hear back from my professor for 48 hours. At this point, I called the Dean that oversaw Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences. I explained my situation to her, and she said that she would call my professor, and that there was a chance that it was just a mistake. The next day I received an email back from my professor

HELLO STUDENT, HERE IS A SUMMARY OF YOUR GRADE TO DATE. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU MISSED (2) CRITICAL DISCUSSION BOARDS WHICH AFFECTED YOUR GRADE SIGNIFICANTLY. PLEASE REVIEW THE COMMENTS I MADE IN BLACKBOARD REGARDING YOUR TERM PROJECT. IF NEEDED WE CAN MEET TO DISCUSS YOUR GRADE FURTHER.

Yes, it was really in all caps. Below that my professor had included my gradebook, which I already saw. That was the whole reason I was getting in touch with him. My professor didn't actually answer any of my questions. So I wrote him back.

Hello Professor, I appreciate your reply, however this doesn't answer my questions. Where is my final? What about my MyEconLab assignments from the last couple weeks of class?

Ceryliae

He replied

Ceyliae (he misspelled my name), please watch your tone. Your final is located in myeconlab, as mentioned in the syllabus if you reviewed it here is a breakdown of how the grades are calculated. Course Assignments and point distribution approximations:

(3) Chapter Mid-Term Exams (MyEcon lab) = 45 %

(1) Final Exam (MyEcon lab) = 25%

(16) Chapter Quizzes (MyEcon lab = 15%

(1) Term Project (Written) = 100 (points)

(10) Chapter H/W/Video Assn. MyEcon lab = + 15%

(6) Chapter Discussion Forums = 120 (points)

Total Points 100% weighted (plus 220 points)

Underneath that, he included the gradebook from MyEconLab. Which I already had. The grade breakdown that he included in this email was already located in the syllabus, which I read. I'm not sure about you guys, but this is very confusing to read and its actually impossible to calculate your grade from this. Once again, he failed to answer my questions. Not only that, he also asked me to watch my tone? I've been nothing but respectful. Also, he implied that I haven't read his dumpster fire of a syllabus, which I have.

My reply to him was

Professor,

I apologize if I come off as rude, it's not my intention. I'm just very confused. The only assignment on blackboard that is labeled as MyEconLab says that it is for weeks 1 through 11, and was last updated on November 6th. How does that include my final exam grade, which was taken on December 15th. Additionally, how can something that was updated on November 6th include all of my assignments for November 7th through the end of the semester?

Also, I did read the syllabus, and I spent quite a while trying to work out how the point distribution is calculated. I wasn't able to figure it out, which is why I asked for some clarification. I'm sorry if asking for clarification came off as being disrespectful.

I wait four days without a reply, and then I called the Dean again. I told her that I didn't feel like this was a mistake, and that I didn't think this was going to be resolved between the professor and me. She told me she would look into it further, and that she's been following our email conversation, but she didn't have my last email to him, which I forwarded in her direction.

Shortly after my phone call with the dean, my professor emailed me back.

Ok, 1st the points in MyEcon Lab are calculated within the My econ lab system based on the weighted point allotment for the particular assignment. This is why I sent you a copy of the syllabus which expresses all assignments in Myecon lab as a weighted %. Hence, the 92% for example on the final, is weighted with all other exam grades, which represented 70% of the Myecon grade.

Secondly, the Big reason, respectfully, your grade was lower than anticipated was based on the (2) discussion boards you missed in my opinion, with those 2 scores you would have been above a 70%.

All I can say is, we can sit down in Spring 2018, during office hours, and I can explain the grading criteria, as I have designed it based on student work within Myecon lab and Blackboard.

You did miss (2) discussion Board Correct? I just ask this to make sure this point clarification is correct.

Again, email me after February 12th, 2018 when I return from Winter Break and we can over your grade scores again.

Thanks Sincerely;

Professor Y.

So now finally I've gotten an answer on one of my questions. He says that he is calculating my grade by reducing all of the assignments that were done on MyEconLab down to a 100 point assignment based on the weighted percentages in the syllabus. This is ridiculous because there are 355 points in total for the class, so reducing all that work down to 100 points means it's all worth very little. The final ended up being only worth 7% of my grade. I replied back to him:

Professor Y.,

I appreciate your efforts to clarify your grading policy, however I am even more confused than before. If I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like you're saying that every single assignment for MyEconLab is weighted according to the percentages on page three of your syllabus. Then those points are counted as part of the "MyEconLab (Weeks 1-11)" assignment, which is worth one hundred points.

This contradicts what your syllabus says on page five:

"Exams: there will be 4 exams over the course of the semester, (3) Midterm and (1) Final. These exams are a combination of multiple choice, matching, ordering, and essays. Each Exam is worth 100 points, and the exams are each worth 45% of your overall grade.

Research Paper: you will submit an 8-10 page research paper on a topic approved by the instructor. A separate handout will be distributed to students with details on formatting this assignment. The research paper is worth 20% of your overall grade and is 100 points. Document Requirements Page Located in Blackboard (Term Project Requirements)." (Emphasis mine)

This seems to contradict what you've stated about the final and midterm exams only being included in the MyEconLab assignment on blackboard. Towards the end of the semester, after I missed the two discussion boards, I realized that I might end up with a D in your class. I consulted your syllabus to see what points were remaining, and found the passages from page five that I quoted above. It seemed to me that the final exam was worth quite a big chunk of points, and I was relying on that to bolster my grade. At the end of last semester I was incredibly busy with other classes, performances, work, and illnesses. I believe you are aware of my illnesses, because you denied my request for an extension on the term paper. For these reasons, I had a limited amount of time to devote to studying. If I had known that in reality, the final was only worth 7% of my overall grade, I would have budgeted my time differently. Instead of studying so much for the final, I would have put more time into my term paper, which seemed to be worth less points.

You keep asking me to reference your syllabus, and in a previous email, you stated that if I had read your syllabus, I would not have questions about my grade. However, your syllabus seems to contradict itself in several places. I saw the quoted passage on page five, and assumed that it was correct. Was I incorrect to rely on your syllabus to guide me in how to approach your class?

Furthermore, I have asked a direct question in three separate emails, and I have not received a direct answer:

There are several assignments which were turned in after November 6th at 2:34 PM, this includes three chapter quizzes as well as my final exam. How are these assignments included in my overall grade, if the MyEconLab assignment was last updated on November 6th at 2:34 PM?

I would appreciate an answer, because it doesn't feel fair to me to receive a grade without all of my work being included in my grade. MyEconLab says that I spent over 4 hours working on assignments that were turned in after November 6th at 2:34 PM. Was that all for nothing?

I am sorry to keep bothering you during the winter break, however this is a time sensitive matter for me, as I receive a hefty discount on my car insurance for maintaining a 3.0 GPA. For that reason, I would like to resolve this as soon as possible.

Please be aware that I have CC'd the dean to this conversation.

Thank you very much, Ceryliae

The professor emailed me back the next day:

Well, I will address these issues within the next 4 weeks with you when we Meet. Again, did you miss (2) discussion Boards?

I am aware you have spoken with my Dean, and Chairman, however, this does not change my position or your grade until further review.

I will be back in the office starting February 13th, 2018 and we can revisit these issues 1 by 1.

Please just reply back for my records if you missed (2) Discussion boards or you can defer until we meet and I will use what I have in blackboard as my answer.

Please, no more emails until we meet, to keep perceptions and frustrations to a minimum.

Thanks.

So not only is he refusing to answer my questions, he also asked me a question about the discussion boards I missed, which I actually answered in the previous email. That means he didn't really read my assignment. Additionally, I can't really afford to wait 4 weeks to resolve this situation as my car insurance will literally go up hundreds of dollars.

I email him back:

Professor Y.,

I am disappointed that you are unwilling to answer my simple questions about my grade at this time, because this situation is very time sensitive for me.

As I stated in my previous email, yes, I did miss those two discussion boards.

I appreciate your offer to meet with me once the spring semester begins, however I don't think it is in my best interest to meet with you alone. I am uncomfortable meeting with you without the dean in attendance.

Thank you, Ceryliae

The next day I hear back from him with this short email:

Grade was changed to a C.

Best Success.

So now I've gotten what I was trying to get a week earlier. However, I'm not satisfied. So I call the dean and tell her that since I've been given the C I'm dropping the matter. However, I still think that Professor Y. should be investigated for how he grades assignments, as well as the confusing nature of his syllabus. She tells me that she is already investigating, and then asks me to put all this in an email to her so that she has a written account. She also tells me that she was calculating my grade and she thought I earned a C. She also didn't think that I had any issues with my tone, and said that I was nothing but respectful.

Here is that email:

Hello Dr. E.,

Professor Y. informed me that he was changing my grade to a C. For this reason, I would like to put this matter to rest. However, there are still some lingering concerns that I feel should be addressed going forward.

It still appears to me that not all of my assignments were calculated into my grade, due to the MyEconLab assignment on blackboard last being updated on November 6th, and the class ending on December 15th.

The syllabus has many inconsistencies as well as flat out missing quite a bit of information. Page three has the grading breakdown and mixes points and percentages, which makes it very confusing. Furthermore, the grading breakdown is contrary to what it stated on page 5:

Along the same lines, there are typos littered throughout the syllabus, including stating that the four exams are each worth 45% of your overall grade, which adds up to 180%. If the Syllabus for Econ-101 is confusing, there is a good chance that his other classes are equally confusing. How many students have not had the confidence to come forward after they were misled or confused by Professor Y's syllabus? I have attached all three revisions of Professor Y's syllabus to this email.

You have been exceedingly helpful with this matter, and I appreciate all the help you've given me.

Thank you,

Ceryliae

So now the professor is under investigation for how he grades assignments as well as his syllabuses. None of this would have happened if he had assigned me the grade I earned.

TL;DR Professor screws me over with my grade. I get the dean involved and my grade is changed to a C. Not satisfied, I also get him investigated by the dean's office.

(source) (story by Ceryliae)

#pro revenge #by Ceryliae #prorevenge #pro revenge stories #revenge #revenge stories

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financialsecrets · 2 years ago

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Host 3 Sites for $49/mo

Hello GmaKelly here, I hope your having a Great Day!

Today I want to tell you about a Great Deal I found for Hosting Websites. Three (3) Websites actually. I want to start by showing you just what Services and Tools are available to you with these three (3) Websites. Where You Start Once you set up your No Cost Starter Account, you get Training and a Walkthrough to set up your first Website and upload it to the Internet. You are now LIVE! Your friends, relatives, colleagues and followers can now find you online. It's so easy once you get past your fear. As with most things in life our fears and self-talk keep us from succeeding. Success is in our own hands and minds. Take a Chance, Jump when you get a Chance and Dance Like No One is Looking. I know I'm bad with the cliche's, but if the shoe fits. (insert pity laugh here) Starter Package vs Premium Look at this chart to see the difference is the Starter Package and the Premium Package. When you complete the first Lessons in the Training, you will be Hungry (more like Starving) for more. I checked on-line before starting this article and I found plenty of offers to Host one(1) site for $49/mo. But not three(3).

And yes the Surprise .... 10 Websites for $99.00! Can you imagine? Not to mention the added security, the SiteSpeed boost, unRivaled Site Support. I had an issue with one of my plug-ins contacted Site Support and this was fixed with 15 minutes, maybe it took that long. That's what I mean, Amazing. Training When you upgrade from the No Cost Starter Package at Wealthy Affiliate to the Premium Package, you accelerate everything. You go from the initial 10 lessons to 120. 120 Core Training Lessons. Designed and Moderated by one of the Founders, Kyle. Then there are the 2,000 or so, posts, pages and trainings written by Long Term Members that are Successful at Affiliate Marketing and most maintain Other Successful Online Businesses. So they know what there doing. Of course I have some favorites and you will too. I find it helpful to watch several of the classes on the same subject. For instance, I might find an article on Hosting a Website, by xyz; but I also find Website Hosting by abc. Read them both, they will always have good advice but sometimes one will have something the other didn't . So read, read, and read. Personal Note: I am an avid note taker. I firmly believe that when you write it down you remember it better. Maybe that doesn't work for you. But if your having trouble, take notes, good KISS notes. (Do I have to tell you what KISS means, really). KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. No offense intended, I don't know you like that. I want to direct you to the information below, as you can see, Wealthy Affiliate has a Worldwide reach, Global, if you will. 2.6 MILLION MEMBERS. Something about this organization has to be the on the up and up don't you think? Final Thoughts I have run through, I can't even tell you how many programs I have reviewed, for my personal information, before finally jumping into Wealthy Affiliate. It was a Leap of Faith, actually. When I started the Training, I just followed what Kyle told me to do. I did it blindly almost. But hey, you're reading this on That Website! So actually. This is proof it works. I would love to see you here at Wealthy Affiliate. This is the most amazing Community. Everyone here in the Global Community steps up for, and with each other if you have any questions. As they say: Your Not Alone Anymore! Come and join me, you'll love it here! If you liked this Article and would like to leave a question or comment, please do so below. I look forward to hearing from your. Thank you Again for Spending Your Time with Me. GmaKelly

Read the full article

#Hosting #MakingMoneyOnline #Websites

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readingraebow · 6 years ago

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Dark Places Section One

Libby Day (Now) - Libby Day (Now) (approx pages 1-120)

1. Why does Libby not have to work? What does Jeff come to visit her about? In what way might Lyle be able to help solve her problem with Jeff? Libby's entire family was murdered when she was seven and a donation fund was set up for her. When she was eighteen she got access to the fund and she's been living off the money in the thirteen years since then. The fund has expanded a few times due to the tragedy reentering the press and small appearances and such in the years since. But now that Libby is 31, people don't really want to donate anymore because she's a grown woman now and there are new little girls who need their help. That's why Jeff sees Libby. He's basically her accountant/is in charge of the fund and he warns her that there's only 900 and something dollars left in the fund and it's time to start thinking about what to do when the money runs out. He suggests Libby find a job. But a letter from Lyle offers Libby a business proposition. She's to meet with his club and he'll pay her $700 just to show up.

2. When Libby gets to the place where the Kill Club meets, she sees booths all around of people obsessed with different crimes and murders. If you were part of the Kill Club, which crime would you have your booth themed? This is a super hard question because there are honestly so many that interest me? Lizzy Borden, Belle Gunness, Gertrude Banizewski, Aileen Wuornos, The Zodiac Killer, The Golden State Killer, H. H. Holmes (as you can see, American Horror Story has only added to my obsession with serial killers; oops), JonBenét Ramsey, Ted Bundy. But honestly the crime that probably interests me the most/I've researched the most/the one I'm most obsessed with is Columbine. So if I had a whole booth dedicated to something, it would be that one. I can literally talk for hours/days/years about Columbine and one time we had friends staying with us and they mentioned Columbine aND I WHIPPED OUT A POWERPOINT to talk about it. It's fine.

3. When Libby gets a chance to talk to the members of the Kill Club, what does she learn about how some of them feel? What does Libby admit that she didn’t actually see?She learns that most of them think Ben is innocent. One of the members in the group is actively trying to get him out of prison. But most of them think that Libby couldn't have possibly seen what she says she saw and that she was lying and was just led by the prosecution to convict the most easy target. They said the case had a spectacular lack of physical evidence and even Libby's testimony was incoherent at best and, yet, Ben was still convicted. The leading theory, though, is that Libby's father, Runner Day, is the actual killer. And while Libby staunchly believes that Ben is the killer, she honestly doesn't know because she was hiding in her mother's closet at the time of the murders and when she heard the murderer start searching the house for her, she jumped out the window and hid until morning. So while she testified that she saw Ben do it, she didn't actually see anything. But she heard everything.

4. What does Patty do for a living, and how is it working out for her? What bad news does Len bring to Patty? Patty runs the family farm. When she married Runner, they took it over from her parents. That was during the boom times and Runner was a little too enthusiastic about it. They ended up taking a loan out from the bank to expand and buy new equipment, thinking that the farm would perform well and they could easily pay it back. But that didn't happen and Runner ended up leaving and now Patty is running the farm alone. Well, she hasn't paid on the loan in three years and her crop doesn't even yield enough to support them and when she does make money from the crops it goes toward the loan but it's just not enough. And the last time Len visited, she had to have an auction and sell off her farming equipment for way less than it was worth and I honestly don't even know how she's running the farm at this point?? Anyway, when Len comes this time, it's to tell Patty that they're foreclosing and she's run out of options.

5. Who is Diondra? Who is Krissi? Diondra is Ben's girlfriend. She's two years older than him (she's 17, he's 15) and rich. Her parents hae another house in Texas and they spend most of their time there so she's left alone a lot and basically does whatever she wants, including not going to school most of the time. And she's who Ben's always talking to on the phone and her house is where he usually goes when he's out. She is basically the biggest influence in his life, at this point, and as soon as he turns 16 and can drive, Ben wants to run away to Wichita (of all places) with her and live in their own apartment and work in her Uncle's sporting goods store. However, there's also Krissi. She's in the grade above Michelle's and has a crush on Ben. He was asked to help with an after school art class one day and he did and that's where he met Krissi. He ended up volunteering to help that art class for another month. Krissi also lives like an hour or so away so she has to wait forever for her dad to pick her up after school so Ben started waiting in the stairwell with her for her dad. Well, one day just before Christmas break, he ended up making out with Krissi.

6. Why does Libby think it’s just as much everyone else’s fault Ben is in jail as it is her fault? Because the entire trial was basically a circus. Libby's testimony was all over the place but the prosecution lawyer led Libby exactly where he wanted her to go and basically convinced her to say Ben was guilty. The defense lawyer treated her like he was walking on egg shells which didn't help Ben in the slightest because all Libby did was defend the prosecution. And then were was Ben himself. He acted like he didn't care at all about the trial and when they asked him about Satanic worship, he just fed right into it. He also wore his long black hair in a ponytail and basically didn't really clean up for court and just looked and acted like a criminal. He didn't try to defend himself at all. The defense lawyer also tried to bring up the evidence that didn't match with Ben but he failed to really make a case and really defend Ben. So while Libby's testimony was the cornerstone of the trial, the entire thing was so poorly handled that it wasn't just Libby's fault Ben was convicted.

7. In what way does Ben act about being in jail when Libby goes to see him? Ben says he's okay with it. It's been almost 25 years and he's made his peace with being in prison. He realizes that a lot of it was his fault because he didn't take the trail seriously enough. He never, ever thought he would be convicted. He thought he would be acquitted and then he'd be more popular at school. But, clearly, that didn't happen. But he also doesn't blame Libby for her testimony and he doesn't think she's the reason he was locked up. He's honestly surprised that anyone believed her because she was seven and so clearly coached. He thinks the fact that anyone believed her just meant that they wanted him locked up and there's nothing he could do about it. And when Libby asks if he wants to get out, he says of course he does but he doesn't see that happening unless they find who really did it. He also says he doesn't have a good alibi for that night so it's not like he really has any ground to stand on if he wanted to appeal. So he's made his peace with being in prison and he's okay with it. It's like he thinks he's making up for not being home to save his family and not being man enough in the first place. But he's glad to see Libby because he really is homesick.

8. Who does Lyle think murdered the Day family and why does he think this? He thinks the Day family was murdered by Lou Cates, Krissi Cates's dad. Apparently the Cates family accused Ben of molesting Krissi and Lyle thinks that Lou came over that night to question Ben about it and went into a rage and just murdered the whole family. Apparently Lou had done time for manslaughter previously. He had a wild temper and finding out someone had hurt his daughter would've definitely set him off. (I don't buy that theory at all though??? The murderer called Libby's name and looked for her. If Lou was looking for Ben and just started murdering, he didn't know any of them and he wouldn't have known to look for Libby. He would've been looking for Ben.)

9. When Libby calls Krissi’s mother, where does she say Lou would be? Where does she say Krissi would be? She says Lou would be in a bar probably somewhere in the state of Kansas (helpful) and to find Krissi just go west on I-70 past Columbia (Missouri, I'm assuming? Since Columbia, Kansas is literally abandoned; also why is Kansas basically just a copy and paste of Missouri with the state name changed???? There are so many towns wITH THE SAME NAME O.O) and take a left into any of the strip clubs. So. Also wildly helpful. (Wow, Krissi's mom. Top job with your first family. You sound like a wonderful human being. Not. *eyeroll*)

Section One Reading Journal

Okay so. We all know that I hated Gone Girl. But for some reason I, at some point, bought all of Gillian Flynn’s novels. And I even started reading one of the others (I thought it was this one but the first chapter isn’t what I remember reading so apparently it was Sharp Objects) but just never got around to finishing it. But her other novels honestly really do interest me. So all of that being said, I’ve been really excited to read this one and I honestly enjoyed this first section so much?? I really didn’t want to put it down.

I love that this story takes place in Missouri and Kansas. I love that Libby currently lives in Kansas City; that’s one of my absolute favorite cities. And that restaurant where she meets Jim Jeffreys I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten at with my aunts??? (It honestly sounded like it might’ve been Jack Stack.) So. Lots of fun little fangirl moments. (Also why do all of Gillian Flynn’s novels seem to take place in Missouri? That fascinates me so much. Though throwback to when I originally read Gone Girl and was talking to my mom about North Carthage and she was like “it’s just Carthage” and I was like no, it’s the one by St. Louis and she was like “no, it’s by Joplin, on the other side of the state.” So apparently that’s a town Gillian Flynn made up, ahaha.)

ANYWAY, I love that this is a really engaging and well written mystery. I’m definitely feeling more of a connection to it than I ever did to Gone Girl. I already like these characters more. And I didn’t figure out the twist five minutes into reading. (I do already have several theories about the murderer, though.) And basically I’m just all around liking this one more.

Though the only thing that’s really bothering me is that I hate that all of the flashbacks are written in third person but all of the present day Libby is written in first. That feels like a weird transition to me and I hate going from the past to present chapters because of it. I’m a big fan of continuity and that format isn’t it.

Also. Side note. Did we pick this book as the first book written by a popular author? Because this is actually Gillian Flynn’s second. We should’ve read Sharp Objects (which I also really want to read because the show looks AMAZING). So. Uh. Oops. I love that we’re so good at picking things. Throwback to picking Lolita for a classic romance. (Oops.) We are on top of things. Go us!

But all kidding aside, I really am loving this book and I can’t wait to devour the next section!!!! (Watch me not go to bed tonight and just read this entire book. That’s what I almost did last night. *shifty eyes*) Okay back to reading =))

#trcbooks #2015: dark places #2015 reading challenge

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taraljc · 7 years ago

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my thing about Batgirl

(Reposting from mah Facebook, because reasons. Also, for clarity, I'm a 44 year old nerd girl who started reading comics when she was 11 or so.)

OK, so, possibly after drinking a statistically significant amount of coffee that I likely shouldn't ought to have done right before catching up on social media, I have now consolidated and cleaned up what was an open letter to Warner Bros but came across more as a bitter and angry rant about something I care a lot about, but the rest of you may not really understand or even care about. So here's what's been on my mind for quite a while now.

I've never been as incandescently happy as I was in this exact moment I learnt a certain womanising hack who has coasted on an outdated reputation for way too long is never going to get the chance to destroy one of my all time favourite female characters in the entire history of comics. I feel as if need to commemorate this with pie of some kind.

(sweet potato pecan pie with bourbon whipped cream is the frontrunner at this time, assuming I can find $$$ to go grocery shopping for the ingredients except the bourbon because you know me. I always have bourbon.)

In case you haven't guessed this is gonna be about Barbara Gordon.

It amazes me how no-one has ever thought to adapt the EPIC storyarc by Ostrander & Yale about how a former vigilante became one of if not THE most power and influential non-superpowered women in the entire DCU after literally being thrown away like trash.

(Google the quote "Cripple the bitch." Trust me, it will make you understand where I'm coming from with a lot of this.)

Oh yeah, and not only did she do so using all the skills she already had before she put on a cape and kicked some ass as one of a dozen minor figures in the Gotham vigilante scene, but she created and ran one of the best covert teams in history.

(If you do not know who the Birds of Prey are, that's OK. An origin film would solve that problem for you.)

OH OH OH and not only was she running the Birds, but she was simultaneously acting as the Field Co-ordinator that turned her original vigilante found family into a much more efficient, effective, and powerful crime-fighting force not just in Gotham but the entire DCU.

All while transitioning to life with a disability. Did I mentioned she'd been shot through the spine solely to torture her uncle/father in one of the most mysoginist comics stories of the past 50 years? Sorry. I probably buried the lede a bit, there.

What really matters is, we're talking about a woman who used her research and cyber security skills honed by her day job as a research librarian and went up against Amanda Waller and came out on top.

If someone who claims to love comics as much as that guy who did that male power fantasy TV show about hot chicks back in the 90s can't figure out why Barbara Gordon as Oracle would have relevance or appeal, well...

What can I say. Maybe it's time to actually hire a writer who can deliver a solid script that doesn't reduce 50 years of history (the balance of which was spent not as Batgirl, but as Oracle) to a casualty of the feud between Bats and the Joker?

So you know, if anybody's looking for a list of creatives that as both a comics fan and a film fanatic whom I believe would be more than up to the challenge, I am ready to write a six part series on @TheMarySue any time. Y'all know where to find me.

I think what a lot of people don't realise that when you take a character like Barbara Gordon who trained hard in isolation, with no teachers or mentors, because she chose to join the fight because she knew she could make a difference, only to be under-used, under-valued, written off as collateral damage, and ultimately expected to fade away into the woodwork...

...there is an incredibly compelling story just sitting there waiting to be explored about how someone with that drive, those skills, that passion for justice who flat out refuses to let the world write her off. She takes the world by the balls and shows them there's still work to be done, and that you don't need to wear a cape and a mask to do it.

And THAT to me, ever since I was 15 years old, reading Ostrander & Yale's Suicide Squad while my other friends were off going to malls or Depeche Mode concerts or whatevs, was what made me a hardcore fan of Barbara Gordon. Not Batgirl. ORACLE. And THAT story of Barbara Gordon becoming Oracle is the story that I want to see told in theatres, to the masses, so they can see what I first saw in a former sidekick who turned into a massive powerhouse in the DCU not by force, but by using her intelect.

I've never got why people don't understand how HUGE it was to see a character who'd been literally thrown away like garbage, be reinvented as a character so much more important and integral to the future of comics, not to mention A++ representation of a hero with a disability.

If no-one can turn that incredibly compelling story into a 120 page screenplay, then it's time to stop looking to the same 4 white guys (like for reals I am not kidding) to write comics adaptations for the big screen, and cast a wider net.

What I'm saying is, I think after the last 2 decades we've seen all there really is to see in terms of range from The Usual Suspects (David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan, Zak Penn, and the aforementioned womanising hack Joss Whedon) that have stayed at the top of studios speed-dial for far too long..

Time to spin that rolodex and give The Wachowski Sisters, Zack Stentz & Ash Miller, Allan Heinberg, Jennifer Lee, or Ava DuVernay a crack at nailing just the right tone and story for a big-budget feature Batgirl.

Look, I know It's easy to play armchair producer when it's not my $$$. But as a fan, Warner Bros. ain't getting a single CENT of my money if they don't take the lessons they learnt from critical & commercial success of Wonder Woman and apply same 1st class treatment to Barbara Gordon/Batgirl.

#batgirl #Tara has all the feels about John Ostrander and Kim Yale #oracle #birds of prey

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designandinteractivity · 4 years ago

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A theory of fun - textbook

What are essential questions? Read the assigned chapter and compose an essential question based on the chapter, or use Honoria’s sample essential questions. In class, present a brief summary of the chapter, ask the class your essential question and lead a discussion on the topic. Prepare follow up questions on the topic to faciltate the discussion with 2 different contributing students.

Theory of Fun (2nd edition) Raph Koster

Game Design 2 - Theory of Fun from Jay Crossler

Chapter 1 Why write this book?

How has your experience of fun and learning changed over time and levels of maturity?

Contrast how you have experienced the same game at different ages.

As a popular game ages, what kinds of changes are made to new versions?

Chapter 2 How the Brain Works

Start with the definitions of games on page 14. Develop your own definition,

Describe one of the patterns in a game or games that you enjoy, or are really good at.

Chapter 3 What Games Are

Describe what you find fun about your favorite game.

Analyze 2 things that ruin the fun in a game you don’t enjoy.

Describe your favorite challenge in all of your game-playing history. (How old were you? Why is it your favorite challenge? How did you succeed or fail at this challenge?)

Chapter 4 What Games Teach Us

Describe the “possibility space” (page 56) of a game you have played in the last year.

Many games encourage “othering” the opponent (page 68). What kinds of stories and games can we design based on insights into how the modern world works?

Chapter 5 What Game Aren’t

Describe the game system and the story of a game you like. Why does that combination of system and story satisfy? Check out page 88 for some descriptions of game sytems in relation to game stories.

Koster defines fun as “the feedback the brain gives us when we are absorbing patterns for learning purposes.” (page 96) Koster describes why school is not thought of as fun. Describe a memory in which learning academic material was fun.

Page 100 lists resasons other than fun to play a game with a system: practice, meditation, storytelling, and comfort. Describe your experience with one of these other reasons for playing a game.

Chapter 6 Different Fun for Different Folks

Psychologist Howard Gardner developed a theory of multiple intelligences

In addition Koster mentions the Five Factor Model

On page 106 Koster poses the question. . .

What does this all mean for game designers? Not only will a given game be unlikely to appeal to everyone, but it is probably impossible for it to do so. The difficulty ramp is almost certain to be wrong for many people and the basic prmises are likely to be uninteresting or too difficult for large segments of the population.

How can designers use empathy for their target audience to best design a game that can potentiate a “change in the culture ... towards greater equality . . . and teaching alternate ways of thinking.” (page 108)

Chapter 7 The Problem with Learning

On page 120 Koster states

(Games) teach us things so that we can minimize risk and know what choices to make. Phrased in another way, the destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.

In the end, (it’s) both the glory of learning and its fundamental problem, once you learn something, it’s over. You don’t get to learn it again. (page 128)

Based on your own experience can you describe a game that was really fun and become boring?

How and why did that shift in enjoyment happen?

How can your experience apply to your creative career in the entertainment industries?

Chapter 8 The Problem with People

On page 134 Koster ponders:

Sticking with one solution is not a survival trait anymore. The world is changing very fast, and we interact with more kinds of people than ever before. The real value now lies in a wide range of experience and in understanding a wide range of points of view. Closed mindedness is actively dangerous to society because it leads to misapprehension. And misapprehension leads to misunderstanding, which leads to offense, which leads to violence.

Consider the hypothetical case where every player of an online role-playing game gets exactly two characters: one male and one female. Would the world be more or less sexist as a result?

What do you think about Koster’s 2 character game question?

On page 140 Koster observes:

The most creative and fertile game designers working today tend to be the ones who make a point of NOT focusion too much on other games for inspiration.

What other sources have you noticed in current games?

What other sources of inspiration can be the basis for a game?

What other discipline can you study that might enhance your game design potential?

TIP Research a discipline such as games inspired by art history.

Chapter 9 Games in Context

Koster observes a number of contexts in which we experience games.

Alone or with others

Any given activity can be performed either by yourself or with others. If you are doing it with others, you can be working either with or against each other. I call these three approaches collaborative, competitive, and solo. (page 142 and 143)

Levels of game interaction

Some forms of interaction are constructive (modding a game), experiential (playing a game) or deconstructive (hacking a game). (page 144)

Koster defines ways in which games can become art.

Mere entertainment becomes art when the communicative element in the work is either novel or exceptionally well done. It really is that simple. The work has the power to alter how people perceive the world around them. (page 150)

Since games are closed formal systems, that might mean that games can never be art . . . But. . .I think . . .we need to decide what we want to say with a given game -- something big, something complex, something open to interpretation, something where there is no single right answer -- and then make sure the player interacts with it, she can come to it again and reveal whole new aspects to the challenge presented. (page 150)

The game would be:

thought provoking reveletory contribute to the betterment of society force us to reexamine assumptions give us different experiences each time allow each of us to approach it in our own way forgive misinterpretations would not dictate would immerse and change a worldview (page 152)

After comparing game design to other artforms Koster concludes:

The designer who wants to use game system design as an expressiver medium must be like the painter and the musician and the writer, in that she must learn what the strengths of the medium are, and what messages are best conveyed by it. (page 162)

What games do you think of as art? What do your chosen art games have in common with specific examples of painting, sculpture, theatre, dance, literature, film, or music.

How can you use Koster’s definition of art on page 148 So what is art?. . . to design games for powerful self-expression and communication?

Chapter 10 The Ethics of Entertainment

Visual representation and metaphor are part of the vocabulary of games. When we describe a game, we almost never do so in terms of the formal abstract system alone; we describe it in terms of the overall experience. (page 166)

The problematic case is a game that contains both brilliant gameplay and offensive content. (page 174)

In this chapter Koster continues to compare games to other art forms such as literature and film and suggests that the lessons learned in those storytelling media can form a constructive lesson for the art of storytelling in games.

Think of an ethically problematic story or character in your game play experience. How would you change that problematic storyline or stereotypical character in order to align with your values?

Chapter 11 Where Games Should Go

. . .other humans have typically been our greatest predator. Today we have come to realize how interrelated we all are, even when the left continent doesn’t know what the right continent is doing. We have come to realize that actions we undertake often have far-reaching consequences that we never anticipated. (page 176)

But, while we’re bemoaning the lack of maturity in the field, we need not to miss the forest for the trees. Too much sex and violence isn’t the problem. The problem is shallow sex and violence. (page 180)

What are the merits of Koster’s argument when he recommends:

We should fix the fact tht the average cartoon does a better job at portraying the human condition thatn our games do. (page 180)

Ideate ethical and exciting victory conditions for a game that you would like to see in the world.

Chapter 12 Taking Their Rightful Place

Koster’s call to action:

It’s time for games to move on from only teaching patterns about territory, aiming, timing, and the rest. These subjects aren’t the preeminent challenges of our day. (page 188)

- Games do need to present us with problems and patterns that do not have one solution, because those are the problems that deepen our understanding of ourselves. - Games need to be created with formal systems that have authorial intent. - Games need to wrestle with issues of social responsibility. - Games need to develop a critical vocabulary so that understanding of our field can be shared. - Games need to push the boundaries. (page 192)

Pick one of the calls to action and do some research on the topic. 1. Explore arguments both for and against Koster’s calls to action. 2. State your own opinion on the subject with your own supporting arguments.

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